netwallah Review of Angela

Angela (1995)

An imaginative girl struggles to make sense of an incomprehensible world

[10/10 · 3 June 2006]

Beautifully conceived and executed, this movie touches on something rarely seen—the testing and rituals imagined by a child to address the destruction of the world she knows. Angela (Miranda Stuart Rhyne) senses the presence of sin and angels in the house where her mother Mae (Anna Levine) is falling deeper and deeper into madness as their father (John Ventimiglia) watches helplessly. She and her little sister Ellie wander through the neighbourhood, meet a lot of strange people, and try to find a way to clean their souls of sin, ultimately with tragic results. They summon the Virgin Mary, but the one who hovers outside the window is probably not genuine or safe. The moments when their mother cycles back to something approximating normal make the girls happy again, but these moments do not last and the happy face becomes drawn and stricken. The sleepwalker next door, always checking her mailbox at night, is not an angel and cannot tell Angela the way to heaven. Angela is drawn to pity Lucifer, who lets her see him pale and writhing in the cellar, pleading softly, the stumps of his wings still bleeding. The river where simpler people are baptized cannot help her as she tries to expiate for sins that she does not understand and that she has never committed. The young actor who plays Angela is riveting, her sister open and appealing, the mother a powerful example of the dissolution of personality, the father gentle but strained far beyond his limits. The key concept--that children faced with unbearable facts, can internalize them and try to bear a family's burdens, and that the intelligent, sensitive, and imaginative child is more likely to enter into this struggle completely--is brilliantly conveyed.