1069 - The Stone Angel

I remember having to read this book in high school, and that's honestly all that I remember about it. I remember that the main characters name was Hagar and that her father bought a Stone Angel for her mother's grave. That's all I had going into this film. Which, sometimes, is a good thing. Gives you a little perspective.

Let's get something out of the way. The performances in this film are pretty solid. You can't say much about them. Christine Horne practically steals the film as Young Hagar, despite the fact that they let her play the character long past her age range. Not her fault though and she did a wonderful job. If they did it properly they would have had a third actress for the middle aged sections. Oh well.

Despite getting second billing in most advertisements I think Ellen Page has... maybe... five minutes of screen time in this. Maybe a few more. Am I a lover of Ellen Page? Yup. Should she have been in this film? Probably not. Again, she does wonders with her film, and I felt more for her character than I did for most of the others (which says something since I mentioned she's barely in it). First off she can't reign in her kind of old soul and the character she played seems far less intelligent than she's capable of showing. I won't go into too further detail in fear of ruining anything to do with the plot.

So my biggest beef with this film is that I never get a chance to care for these characters. We're running around all over the place, and it's great. I totally get a sense of what happened in her life, the tragedies, the lovely bits, but did I get a chance to care? No. Was that intentional? I don't know. Maybe. The only time we get close is when she's with Leo played by "Tell Me You Love Me"'s Luke Kirby. It's the only time I really felt two characters in this film really connected. There's some very small moments between Dylan Baker and Ellen Burstyn, but they're few and far between.

Entertaining enough, but I think the main problem is in that, and this film is not alone in this, is that it falls into that "well it was in the book" justification that a lot of adaptations try to cling to. After this conversation I started poking at some of the weak areas and a friend kept saying, "It was like that in the book" which just makes me think - if you love the book so much, why bother making a film of it? Leave it as it is. Unless you think you can enhance it, make it bigger and better, what's the point?