Angela (film)

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Angela
Angela movie poster
Directed by	Rebecca Miller
Starring	Miranda Stuart Rhyne Charlotte Eve Blythe
Release date(s)	January 1995 Sundance Film Festival
Running time	99 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
IMDb profile

Angela is an award winning 1995 film and the first film directed by Rebecca Miller. It won awards at the Sundance Film Festival, the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film and the Gotham Awards.^[1] Rebecca Miller is married to Daniel Day-Lewis and is the daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Mörath.

[edit] Plot

This film is the story a young girl and her quest to purify herself.

Angela (Miranda Stuart Rhyne) is a ten year old girl trying to cope with her family's falling apart. Her parents are former aspiring entertainer/artists who have resigned themselves to the loss of their dreams. They are now having some weird, not quite clearly stated problems in their relationship. Her mother Mae (Anna Thomson) has drastic mood shifts that bring her from manic happiness to utter misery. Her father Andrew (John Ventimiglia) tries to hold everyone together, but Mae's vacillations are becoming more than he can manage. Angela, tries to cope by inventing an imaginary universe of 'order' for herself and her little sister. Left to figure out everything for themselves, she grabs at scraps of religion, superstition, and fantasy to try and make some sense out of the world and understand the difference between good and evil. Their interpretation of reality is both sad and somewhat frightening.

Adrift, she and her six year old little sister Ellie (Charlotte Eve Blythe) concoct magical rituals and have visions of fallen angels and the Virgin Mary; reading signs in the way a towel falls off a chair or a tool falls off a truck, they set off to find their way to heaven. They wander through the neighbourhood, meet a lot of strange people, and try to find a way to absolve themselves of whatever 'sins' they may have committed, and 'go to heaven'.

At first, the stories that Angela tells her little sister are mainly meant to scare her into submission. But as time goes on, and her mother succumbs to mental illness, Angela becomes obsessed with the idea that the only way her mother is going to get better is if she and her sister can wash away all of their sins.

The fact that children believe in their own omnipotence, the fact that children can see things that we do not, and the fact that children who are 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 well portrayed in this film.