vernon film society
Bringing the best in world and Canadian film to film lovers of Vernon and the North Okanagan
THE STONE ANGEL
Director: Kari Skogland
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Christine Horne, Cole Hauser, Kevin Zegers, Ellen Page
Run Time: 100 minutes
Country: Canada
Year: 2007
Language: English
Rating: 14A (Sexually suggestive scenes)
Not yet released
Official site: www.thestoneangelmovie.com
Ellen Burstyn (Requiem for a Dream, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), gives a tour-de-force performance in The Stone Angel, which screened at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival®. This remarkable film is the much-anticipated adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s landmark Canadian novel. The story leaps onto the screen with elegance and ease, beautifully fulfilling the emotional power of the original work. As flinty and immovable as the Stone Angel itself, Hagar Shipley is defined by the fierce pride she inherited from her father. Facing imminent death, and refusing to yield even to mortality, Hagar’s mind conflates past and present as she makes a final grasp for independence, finding instead an unexpected and humbling reconciliation. Now living with her son Marvin (Dylan Baker, Happiness, Fido), elderly Hagar (Burstyn) is brought to a nursing home – to see what she thinks. Her response is easily predicted, and she later bolts from her son’s house, determined to find a seaside home she remembers from her youth.
Throughout this journey, chapters in her life coalesce and we come to know the radiant young woman – scion of her father’s mercantile empire – who is disowned when she marries the rough, bold Bram Shipley (Cole Hauser, Dirty, The Break-Up). Romantic illusions soon dissipate, and Hagar begins to think her husband is beneath her. Her disdain for him, exacerbated by discontent with her own unfulfilled ambitions, incites a hereditary flaw as she denies her children the parental approval she so desired from her father. In the present, Hagar finds her way to the seashore, but has little time left to amend a lifetime of unacknowledged mistakes. Burstyn’s brave performance lays bare the paradoxes of a woman who caused immense damage to herself and others, yet was herself subject to her father’s tyrannical nature.
The cast boasts some of Canada’s best young actors; they beautifully enrich this character-driven piece. Christine Horne is particularly luminous as the young Hagar. Writer and director Kari Skogland adapts the well-loved novel faithfully and with integrity, bringing the fictional landmark of Manawaka vividly to life. “Icarried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched,” Hagar realizes in the novel. The Stone Angel is a lush, eloquent evocation of Hagar’s powerful journey.
