Review: An Angel at My Table

Campion’s film comes up short in never satisfactorily illustrating the importance or character of Frame’s writing.

An Angel at My Table
Photo: Fine Line Features

Jane Campion initially conceived of her adaptation of author Janet Frame’s series of three autobiographies, To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City, as a TV miniseries. Only into production did the New Zealand Film Commission suggest a theatrical release, apparently because the biopic is the singular genre that looks, feels, and acts like episodic television and still plays nominally well in movie theaters. The film, named after the volume of Frame’s memoirs that recounts her elongated residence in a psychiatric ward, is no doubt a heartfelt tribute to a soft-spoken, melancholic writer from a director who claims to cherish her work as being very important in her own development. And though An Angel at My Table is shackled to that unyielding, difficult narrative structure of most biopics, this quality also works to the film’s benefit, as Frame’s life is unspooled with the same sort of scenes-as-brushstrokes impressionism of Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaseon.

Still, whereas Im’s film becomes increasingly restless and elliptical as it goes on, culminating in one of the most poetic representations of an artist stepping into legend (via a kiln), An Angel at My Table begins at the pinnacle of Campion’s whimsicality before settling into a mundane processional march. Janet, first seen as a baby covering her face trying to deflect her approaching mother’s bosom, followed by a panorama of her as a knobby-kneed pre-teen against the rolling New Zealand landscape, goes through her early childhood as an outcast at school. She’s from a poor family, has poor hygiene (later in her teens, she let her teeth rot brown), and when she offers her entire class chewing gum bought with money she stole from her father’s woolen pocket, her teacher reveals her thievery to the class, who then sneers.

Which is to say nothing of the untamable patch of ginger cotton growing from Frame’s scalp, which remains a constant in her life as she moves from the university to the asylum to a successful writing career complete with grants to travel to Paris and Spain. An Angel at My Table traces Frame’s life across more than 30 years, and she’s portrayed by three different actresses (in order of age: Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, and Kerry Fox) whose remarkable resemblance to each other extends beyond their appearance and mannerisms. They seamlessly pass the psychological baton and collectively sculpt a convincing portrait of growth.

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Campion’s knack for intimate yet paradoxically epic artistry nibbles off Laura Jones’s bite-sized scene-sketches of loneliness and makes entire meals of them, swallowing cast and location up alike in an effort to centralize the three actresses playing Frame, and to the point that even the most major supporting characters (her older sister, an American lover in Ibiza) are delegated to the sidelines. Given the manner in which Frame’s wild crown of fuzz takes up the upper part of the frame across the film’s many close-ups, she comes to resemble a kind of hourglass, suggesting (however inadvertently) the time that she struggles to remember and catalog in writing her own memoirs, as well as the time she lost in a mental institution, where she endured no less than 200-odd electroshock treatments. Campion’s film comes up short, however, in never satisfactorily illustrating the importance or character of Frame’s writing, which, while lauded for its selflessness, can’t survive the filmmaker’s tightly honed individualist scrutiny without occasionally lapsing into solipsism.

Score: 
 Cast: Kerry Fox, Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, Iris Churn, K.J. Wilson  Director: Jane Campion  Screenwriter: Laura Jones  Distributor: Fine Line Features  Running Time: 158 min  Rating: R  Year: 1990  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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