Are there any networks making movies-of-the-week? It seems like the market’s still ripe for them, what with the demand for stories of perseverance over adversity and whatnot. What better film to reintroduce the viewing public to weekly simplicity than writer-director Kari Skogland’s adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel? With a host of television credits to back her and a mechanically saccharine version of an iconic Canadian novel, it seems like a natural fit.
A synopsis almost seems like an insult to the Canadian school system, given the novel’s ubiquity, but for those without the benefit of high school memories (myself included): Hagar Shipley (played as an old woman by Ellen Burnstyn and as a young woman by Christine Horne) lives under the shadow of her father, alcoholic husband and misplaced love — all represented by the titular stone angel. Jumping between the past, where she struggles to find love and fulfilment, and the present, where she is about to be institutionalized, Hagar lays out the pieces of her life and finds the puzzle still unsolved.
Skogland’s adaptation, however, suffers no such ambiguity. The Stone Angel is not so much a film as it is a series of scenes strung around shots of the titular cemetery monument taken from every conceivable angle. These shots are leadenly dropped in whenever Skogland insists on reminding the audience that a moment is Profoundly Important, while every remaining scene is sharpened to a fine point and shoved forcefully into that same audience’s ear.
In a film that insists on adding clumsy expository nuggets like Hagar exclaiming “my brother!” or adding a sorrowful “father…” to a phone conversation, it isn’t surprising the rest of Skogland’s screenplay follows the same blunt approach. It isn’t hard to imagine silent film-era intertitles popping up at the beginning of each scene to explain “Hagar learns to love” or “an aged Hagar proves feisty,” the latter being the de facto message of the film.
The difficulty is plain enough — Laurence’s novel tries to decompress the life of a 94-year-old facing a lifetime of revelation and unanswered questions, leaving Skogland with the task of pulling enough salient points to create a comprehensible through-line. Like so many adaptations, the result is more rote repetition than storytelling, the absurdity of which is brought into sharp focus when the script transposes its own naturalistic dialogue against Laurence’s syrupy prose.
All the basic elements of a film are present: plot, characters, endless shots of a recurring motif, but together they’re little more than the churning gears of a machine. On the plus side, a structure this mechanical can always accommodate a few missing pieces, perfect for commercial breaks.
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)