Far more staid than Sweetie, her debut, Jane Campion’s second film nevertheless dramatizes the life of New Zealand poet and novelist Janet Frame in a way only Campion could: with an eye for the poetically evocative detail and an intuitive understanding of the way gender can function as a trap.
Divided into three sections by screenwriter Laura Jones, who drew from Frame’s autobiographies, An Angel at My Table devotes its first third to Frame’s childhood. Young Janet (Alexia Keogh) has a cumulus cloud of curly red hair floating about her head, making her an easy target for teachers and others. It’s a hardscrabble upbringing, but mostly a loving one at home, where Campion offers as many experiential vignettes (the game of “turn” she plays each night with the three sisters with whom she shares a bed) as Major Life Events (the drowning of her spirited older sister).
A voracious reader and close observer, the child Janet seems to believe there might be a place in the world for her. Some of that optimism still survives when she’s a teen (Karen Fergusson). But that’s not the case when we cut, somewhat harshly, to Janet as a young adult. Now played by Kerry Fox, Janet’s mental state seems as unkempt as the frizzy mass that still stands on her head. Clinging to door frames, hunched over books alone in back rooms, Fox plays her as a bundle of raw nerves. She wears unease on her sleeve and seems to feel her outcast status deep in her bones. A strong enough student to earn a trip to college, where it’s assumed she’ll be trained as a teacher, the increasingly socially anxious Janet eventually suffers a breakdown.
In contrast to Fox’s vivid performance, Campion takes an oblique approach to the material. Even though we understand Janet’s distress, it’s still startling to hear a character reference her suicide attempt (something that takes place offscreen). When she’s sent to a psychiatric hospital for a number of years, the movie immerses us in particular details (the dehumanizing shapelessness of the hospital gowns), while offhandedly mentioning that Janet’s work was being published (and winning prizes) during this very same period. Initially this feels as if the movie has major gaps, but you could also argue that it’s presenting these years as Janet experienced them: in a fog of psychiatric “care” that miraculously didn’t kill her creative spirit.
If we don’t always fully realize what is happening to Janet in An Angel at My Table, it’s because she doesn’t fully realize it herself. Almost debilitatingly passive because of her social anxiety, underestimated and manipulated because of her gender, Frame more often than not finds herself in places she’s been put, rather than places she intended to go. A rare period of intentional independence occurs when she uses a literary grant to travel abroad, but even then she plugs away writing while being buffeted by the whims of various men.
This is why the movie’s final moments are so moving. We find Janet living in a camper in her sister’s backyard. A radio plays a Herma Keil cover of “The Twist,” which she is listening to with a niece until the niece is sent to bed. Left alone, Janet tries dancing to the song herself, but is suddenly struck with a bolt of inspiration. Rushing back to her typewriter in the camper, she gets down some words—“Hush, hush, hush”—then sits back with a smile. This is all she ever wanted: a safe space, to be left alone, to write. It doesn’t seem all that much to ask.
