An Angel at My Table: the film that teamed Jane Campion and Kerry Fox

Firstly, I would like to extend a sincere thank you to the staff of the website dbtechno.com for having recently featured material from one of my blog entries on their website.

Secondly, as noted on this blog’s very first entry, I mentioned that the years 1980-1990 would be covered herein. Therefore, today’s entry deals with a film from the year 1990. That film is An Angel at My Table, which is the biography of New Zealand author Janet Frame, and is based on the author’s three separate autobiographies. It was originally intended to air on television as a miniseries but was instead released as a feature film.

An Angel at My Table was directed by Jane Campion, who a few years later went on to direct the Oscar-winning film The Piano. Incidentally, Campion was the second female ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar, for her work on that film.

This film stars Kerry Fox in the role of Janet Frame. Fox is perhaps best known for her starring role in the 1994 cult classic film Shallow Grave. In this film however, Fox delivers what I would say is probably the best onscreen portrayal ever of a morbidly shy woman.

The film is divided into three segments. The first segment covers the early years of Frame’s life. We see Frame as a young girl growing up a crowded, noisy household in a rural setting. We witness her interactions with other kids. The intense shyness that would go on to permeate her adult life wasn’t readily apparent at the time.

We don’t begin to get glimpses of what her life would turn out to be like until she’s already an adolescent. The second segment of the film covers this period. Any viewer who’s ever suffered from shyness or general awkwardness can sort of relate to Frame and/or see aspects of themselves in her. I first saw this movie when I was my teens, and in some ways I kind of identified with her, since growing up I was mainly a shy kid. Also, Frame was a late bloomer, much like myself. Nevertheless, hers was a life that seemed to have a thread of constant pain and suffering woven into it. It was during this period of her adolescence that she lost one of her sisters to a drowning.

It’s not until the events in third segment of the film that Frame’s life begins to fall apart. By this part of the story, she has already reached adulthood. We see her living with an aunt and uncle while she attends college. Things seem to be going fairly well for her as she undergoes training to become a teacher. That plan ultimately gets derailed one day as her anxiety prevents her from being scrutinized by an inspector who observes her as she teaches her class.

Innocently, she allows one of her instructors to read a draft of an autobiography that she’s written, and through it he learns that she had attempted suicide by swallowing a large number of Aspirin pills. He and some officials from her school convince her into spending some time at the psychiatric ward of a hospital. But, when the time comes for her to be sent home, she refuses to leave (due to her father’s violent temper), and she therefore gets sent to a mental asylum. Once she’s there, she gets diagnosed with schizophrenia, which according to a dictionary definition of the condition read by her sisters is "a gradual deterioration of the mind with no cure."

Although she's been discharged from the asylum, the worst is still to come, as she once again loses a sister in yet another drowning accident. As Frame herself mentions in the weeks after the drowning, she comforted herself with writing. Unfortunately for her, she later gets talked into going back to a mental asylum, being told that they offer a "new treatment" there, and it's believed that her condition is curable. For the next eight years, she becomes subjected to over 200 electric shock treatments at the asylum. She’s even placed on a schedule to have a lobotomy. Thankfully though, her first book (containing short stories) gets published while she’s still at the asylum, and it’s subsequently determined that she won’t be needing the lobotomy.

When she finally gets discharged from the asylum for once and for all, she gets introduced to a famous writer who invites her to move in with him so that she can spend her days working on new writing material. It is during this time that her first novel gets published, and she thereby secures a literary grant to travel overseas. Her travels take her to the cities of London and Paris, and later to coastal Spain. While in Spain, she briefly falls in love with an American man during the course of the summer. She then returns to London and has difficulty finding decent work, so she voluntarily admits herself to a psychiatric hospital. After some time, a psychiatrist there determines that she never suffered from schizophrenia, and he recommends that she undergo weekly psychotherapy sessions. Thenceforth, she continues with her writing endeavors.

This movie has a runtime of two hours and thirty minutes, but it’s well worth it. The story itself is very sad, as Frame’s life was, for the most part, a sad life. In spite of that, you do get to see moments of joy in her life, and you can't help but feel proud for her whenever she's seen having a new successful accomplishment. Kerry Fox’s performance (as Frame) was simply astonishing. A tremendous performance, and it was a breakthrough for her acting career. And in summary, this film was a marvelous achievement for its director, Jane Campion.

A Handful of Dust, featuring the always-amazing Kristin Scott Thomas

I consider the years 1984 and 1988 the two best years of the 80s for films. Those two years contained many wonderful movies and noteworthy performances. One of those performances that stands out to me is that of Kristin Scott Thomas in the 1988 film A Handful of Dust. Directed by Charles Sturridge, the film is set in England during the 1930s. Scott Thomas plays Brenda, the wife a landed aristocrat named Tony. The duo reside in a large estate in the countryside with their young son. Despite the fact that nothing appears to be lacking in Brenda's life, she seems to have grown bored with the relative isolation and the monotonous routine of living in Tony’s ancestral home, known as Hetton Abbey.

After a weekend visit from a friend of Tony’s named Thomas, who’s of a lower social rank, Brenda decides to spend time in London, as she has developed a special interest in Thomas. She fancies Thomas and wishes to get to know him better. She thus begins traveling back and forth from Hetton Abbey to London on a fairly frequent basis, first under the pretext that she’s going visit her sister. Later, she decides to rent a flat in London. It just so happens that the woman she’s renting the flat from is the mother of Thomas. Brenda then very willingly enters into an affair with Thomas, seeing him whenever she’s in London, all the while maintaining the illusion that she simply wants to spend some time away from the idleness of Hetton Abbey to relish the liveliness of London.

Brenda’s trusting and unsuspecting husband has no clue of what’s really going on, though a couple of other people within their social circle are fully aware of the circumstances. She even convinces him to let her sign up for an Economics course -- more of a reason to spend time in London. It’s during one of her stays in London that an unexpected family tragedy leads her back to Hetton Abbey. Once there, she’s determined make the definitive choice to leave Tony. She returns to London to reunite with Thomas, and writes a letter to Tony to inform him that she had been having an affair with Thomas and intends to marry him. She then files for divorce from Tony and seeks a large financial settlement from him, which incidentally would require him to lose his ancestral home.

Tony refuses to grant Brenda the divorce, and instead chooses to travel abroad for a few months. He ventures to South America with an explorer friend of his, and that voyage, as it turns out, will change his destiny and that of Brenda.

The role of Brenda was the breakout performance for Scott Thomas, and it’s a pity that she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. Though I must admit that 1988 was a very competitive year for actresses in leading roles. The film boasts a great cast which includes Judi Dench, James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Angelica Huston, and Alec Guinness who plays an elderly loner living amidst native Indians in the Amazonian jungle. Altogether, this a very good film which managed to snag an Oscar nomination for its beautiful costume design.

Resurrection: One of Ellen Burstyn’s best performances

In the 1980 film Resurrection, Academy Award-winning actress Ellen Burstyn plays a woman who undergoes a near-death experience following a car accident. She subsequently develops a supernatural power to heal the sick, apparently as an after-effect of having survived the near-death experience.

The film starts off showing Burstyn’s character Edna going about her daily life with her husband Joe in California. Edna decides to buy Joe a new car for his birthday, which she presents to him that very day after he gets out of work. The couple then decides to go for a joy ride in their new car, with Joe driving. Once on the road, Joe loses control of the car in an attempt to avoid running over a young boy who had carelessly skateboarded onto the street, and the car ends up crashing over a cliff.

Joe dies in the accident, whereas Edna sees herself being pulled into a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end, indicative of a near-death experience. In the tunnel, she happens to see people that she knew from her past who had already died, some of whom she doesn’t immediately recognize. She winds up waking up in a hospital bed, unable to move. There, she learns that Joe is dead, and her doctor informs her of the severity of her condition. She’s got damage to her lower back including a blood clot on her spinal cord, and she learns that she won’t be able to move her legs because the main nerves in both legs have been severed below the knee.

Devastated upon hearing of what has happened, Edna decides to move back to her native Kansas with her father, who had come to visit her at the hospital. He drives her from California to Kansas, and on the way there, they make a stop at an isolated gas station manned by an elderly male attendant. Unbeknownst to Edna, that gas station will play an important role later in her life.

Not too long after they arrive in the rural small town where Edna grew up, she comes to the realization that she has a power to heal people of their injuries and afflictions -- something that she can accomplish by simply placing her hands on their bodies. From that point on, she becomes determined to not only help heal other people but to heal her own self of the injuries that she sustained in the car accident.

The townspeople grow impressed with Edna’s ability to heal, though some suspect that the healing power she possesses is in reality the work of the Devil. One of the naysayers happens to be a devoutly religious man whose son, named Cal (played by Sam Shepard), becomes Edna’s love interest. Amidst the town’s speculation over Edna’s healing power, a couple of scientific researchers from California who have witnessed some of her public healings invite her back to California to conduct tests on her power. Cal himself eventually develops a suspicion of his own with regard to Edna’s power, wondering if there is a divine source to it.

Burstyn rightfully received an Oscar nomination for her work in this film. It's a believable performance, and one I consider among her best ever. The film features striking music composed and conducted by Maurice Jarre. Overall, this is a very good film which I happen to like a lot. Though I must say, it seemed almost like this film was a satire, made with the intention of poking fun at the deep-rooted religious convictions that can typically be found in the small towns of America’s heartland.

Sophie’s Choice: The greatest performance ever by an actress?

If one were to take a poll of “Who do you consider the greatest actress alive?” most respondents would likely choose Meryl Streep. In the same vein, if there is one female acting performance that is generally thought of as the best (or the greatest) of all time, it’s Streep’s performance in the 1982 movie Sophie’s Choice. The role itself is one of Streep’s best-known roles, and I’m sure most people who’ve seen the movie would say that Streep’s performance definitely ranks as one of the best ever by any actor or actress. Streep, being the queen of mastering foreign accents, takes on a Polish accent in this movie. She plays a Holocaust survivor from Poland who lives in a boarding house in Brooklyn, New York with an unstable, abusive boyfriend named Nathan (played by Kevin Kline). The couple befriends a new boarder at the house -- a novelist who’s known as Stingo (played by Peter MacNicol) who hails from the South.

The movie, which takes place two years after the end of World War II, mainly focuses on the friendship of the trio as they go about their day-to-day lives in the boarding house and elsewhere. Sophie had been an inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the war, and while there, she was chosen to work as a secretary for the camp’s Nazi commandant, due to her fluency in German. Once in the United States, and suffering from anemia, she was taken in and looked after by Nathan who works for a pharmaceutical company. As Stingo gets to know this couple better, he comes to discover that there’s more than meets the eye with them. Not only does Sophie have some skeletons in the closet, but it just so happens that Nathan harbors a shocking secret of his own.

 

The movie itself can be described as lukewarm at best. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, and having a runtime of 2 hours and 30 minutes, it's slow-paced and overlong for its subject matter (it’s primarily a story of friendship). Also, there aren't many scenes showing Sophie’s past, which is somewhat ironic, considering that the title of the movie refers to a choice she made during the war. The actual scene involving the revelation of Sophie’s “choice” is, for the most part, underwhelming.

Nonetheless, Streep delivers a spellbinding performance, and she speaks three languages in the movie: English, Polish, and German -- rumor has it that she actually spoke German with a Polish accent. One particular scene, in which she delivers a lengthy monologue, is the best scene of the movie.

This performance remains Streep’s greatest performance ever, and nothing that she's done since has surpassed the caliber of it. Her performance in 1985’s Out of Africa is perhaps the only one that comes close. Streep rightfully won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Sophie’s Choice, and it’s bewildering that despite her multiple Oscar nominations since then, the Academy did not give her another Best Actress award until this year (for The Iron Lady, nearly 30 years after her win for Sophie‘s Choice).

When it comes to determining what’s the best performance ever given by an actor or actress, it’s all subjective. I’ve seen lots of films from several decades. To me, Streep’s performance in Sophie’s Choice is, without question, the best performance by any actress during the decade of the 80s. But the best performance ever? Sorry, Meryl, but that is an honor I can only reserve for someone else. As far as I’m concerned, THIS is the greatest female acting performance of all time:

And if you're wondering, the actress is Vanessa Redgrave, and the movie is Isadora (from 1968).