I accidentally went and let 11 days pass from when I watched the oldest Jane Campion film I hadn't seen, An Angel at My Table (1990), and when I've finally come to write about it. That kind of delay doesn't benefit the writing of a piece like the current one, especially when the movie in question didn't make a huge impression on you.
I suppose, for the similarity of subject matter, time period and corner of the world, this biopic of a famed New Zealand writer felt most similar to Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career, a biopic-like story of a fictitious Australian writer. It's been a while since I've seen that, though, so I don't know if my comparison holds any water beyond the superficial commonalities. I didn't love My Brilliant Career either, though, so the films have that in common for sure.
To say I didn't love An Angel at My Table, the biopic of Janet Frame, doesn't mean I didn't like it. Or at least admire it. Did I enjoy it? Not really. Did I see the point of making it? Again not really.
Never having heard of Frame outside the context of this movie doesn't have much to do with my feelings about her life having the worthiness to be documented on film. Though at the start, I did wonder why we were watching a movie about this shy redhead, whose hair is her most defining personality trait, who has a flair for behaving oddly but is otherwise a rather normal seeming young woman growing up in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Then I started to see the full design of the movie, and that Frame would be hospitalized for psychiatric reasons multiple times and for long stretches during her young adulthood. In fact, she received frequent doses of electroshock therapy and was even scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled just before, and only because of, the winning of a literary award by a collection of short stories she had written.
When she is ultimately, finally, saved from the clutches of a backwards medical profession, she starts to have a normal life including the fits and starts of relationships, and travel abroad to Spain and England.
One of the things that tested my patience a bit about An Angel at My Table is that it's two hours and 38 minutes long, which was not at all a customary length for a movie in 1990, particularly not a movie that doesn't have ambitions toward being a sweeping epic. Only poking around with some research afterward did I discover why this is: It was originally produced as a television miniseries before being packaged as a film. This explains both its length and its episodic nature, and the overall structure is what it is because it's a dramatization of three different autobiographies by Frame, the middle of which lends its title to the movie.
After I got over some of my initial "why am I watching this?" vibes, I did grow to be interested in Frame, as you do with a character with whom you spend a lot of time -- in, for example, a miniseries. Lacking a prior understanding or appreciation of her career made it difficult for me to place her life in a useful context, but it also occurred to me that there are many, many lesser films made about the lives of people we know very well. Better to have a good film made about someone I don't know than a bad film about someone I do.
Plus it gave me a chance to appreciate the early cinematic gestures of Campion, whose first film, Sweetie (1989), really captivated me when I saw it five years ago. That film captures personality types that have come familiar to me due to living in this part of the world, in all their bedraggled eccentricity, and An Angel at My Table starts out in much the same vein. I'm more naturally inclined toward a modern-day portrait of off-putting weirdos than I am a biopic of a writer, but An Angel at My Table does seem like an important bit of progression for Campion, one that allowed her to really break out with another period film in The Piano three years later.
I'll check in with the next Campion film I haven't seen, 1999's Holy Smoke!, in July. But in the meantime it's back to Bigelow in May with Near Dark.
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