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THE STONE ANGEL
Directed by Kari Skogland. Starring Ellen Burstyn, Christine Horne, Cole Hauser, Keven Zegers, Ellen Page. Opens Fri, May 23.
4 stars

Hagar Shipley is not happy. Her son Marvin and daughter-in-law Doris—living embodiments of the dull, obedient, bourgeois respectability she’s spent her whole life chafing against—have taken her to visit the nursing home where they’re thinking of placing her. 

It’s a cheery enough place, but in her contrarian way, the sheer cheeriness of it all rubs Hagar the wrong way. She has a great line when the “tour guide” shows the Shipleys the dining area, and points out the flowers on the tables and the large
windows allow sunshine to stream into the room while everyone is
eating. But all Hagar can see are the rows and rows of regimented tables: “I don’t know,” she mutters unhappily as she shuffles through the
room. “I never much cared for army life.”

That joke—a sardonic line worthy of Philip Marlowe—sails right over everyone’s head, which only makes Hagar seem even cooler. One of the best things about The Stone Angel, writer/director Kari Skogland’s adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s CanLit classic, is its refusal to condescend to the experience of growing old and helpless. They never reduce Hagar (beautifully played by Ellen Burstyn) to being merely “feisty” or “crotchety” or any of those other belittling adjectives we like to apply to old people. Hagar’s not “feisty”; she’s sharp and funny. She’s not “crotchety”; she’s angry and frightened. And those personality traits don’t exist in isolation; they’re the result of a whole lifetime of decisions, some wise, some foolhardy. 

For a supposedly “beloved” Canadian novel, The Stone Angel seems to generate an unusual amount of hostility—mostly, I suspect, from guys who were assigned the book in high school and who still resent having been forced to experience an entire story from a female point of view. I’m not sure what the problem is, though; Hagar’s the furthest thing from some drippy, passive heroine. As a long-limbed prairie beauty (played in flashbacks by Christine Horne), she’s unconventional enough to be attracted to the low-class Bram (Cole Hauser) and willing even to defy her prosperous Scottish father by marrying him. She even smokes the occasional joint.

But she’s also got her blind spots: she’s genuinely shocked when her father cuts her out of his will, and as a mother, she blatantly favours her younger, wilder son John over the more dutiful Marvin. Hagar’s famous “pride”—the subject of countless high-school essays—is nicely dramatized here: when Hagar, now forced to work as a maid, humbly asks her boss for some time off or visits former childhood friends in their much nicer homes, you can see how painful it is for this woman to be reminded of how far she has fallen socially.

Thankfully, Skogland’s screenplay jettisons pretty much all of the heavy-handed symbols and Biblical allusions that weighed down Laurence’s book and turns the film into more of a character study. It’s a very smart adaptation; there’s a stretch in the film’s middle third where you
can feel Skogland having to compress a lot of incidents from the novel into a limited amount of screen time, but she takes care to make
sure even these short scenes have enough texture—a small acting moment, a memorable image—to keep you from feeling she’s just glossing over them.

That’s not what the National Post or The Globe & Mail think, though; reviewers from both papers found the film to be well-made but a little bit sprawling and more than a little dull. Am I taking crazy pills here? The Stone Angel may not be flashy, but as a citizen of the prairies, when I see those Toronto critics shrugging their shoulders at a film with this level of intelligence and old-fashioned craftsmanship while praising a crushingly dull, cinematically inert CanLit adaptation like Fugitive Pieces, I can feel my regional pride flaring up. And don’t you dare call me crotchety, either—no, I’m downright angry!