ANGIE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Geena Davis, James Gandolfini, Aida Turturro, Stephen Rea, Philip Bosco. Screenplay: Todd Graff. Director: Martha Coolidge.
There is a sub-genre of film drama, only recently identified, which has come to be known as the "chick movie." The term has at times been used to define any film which women tend to like more than men (SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE comes to mind), but in its strictest sense I define a "chick film" as one which deals with relationships men could only attempt to comprehend: mother-daughter, female friendships, and birth mother-child. ANGIE definitely falls within this framework. It's got mothers, daughters, friends, childbirth and a dose of heartbreak to guarantee maximum lacrimal viscosity, and all these things may affect the target audience. I found myself impressed by Geena Davis' performance, but bothered by the obvious and excessive manipulation which never really pays off, and by some unfortunate mixed messages.
Davis plays the title character, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn resident Angie Scacciapensieri. Approaching thirty, Angie has spent her whole life in the same neighborhood with the same best friend, Tina (Aida Turturro), and the same boyfriend, Vinnie (James Gandolfini). Then one day, something does change in Angie's life: she's pregnant. As everyone assumes she and Vinnie will be getting married, Angie begins to think about all the experiences she's been missing. She begins a relationship with flighty attorney Noel (Stephen Rea), and tries to expand her horizons. But as the baby arrives, Angie realizes that ultimately she must confront the memory of the mother who deserted her at the age of three to get her life straight.
Geena Davis' performance as Angie is easily the best thing about ANGIE, which is fine because it's also the most important thing. Most of Davis' roles to date have emphasized her comic talents, but ANGIE confirms what THELMA & LOUISE suggested: that Davis is a very gifted all around actor. She gets to work with the whole range of emotions, big and small, bright and dark, and she handles all of them with grace and sparkle. Stephen Rea is also extremely slick and charming as Noel, and the scenes between Davis and Rea provide many of ANGIE's highlights. Through its first hour, ANGIE is an interesting and appealing character drama with real promise.
The second half of Todd Graff's script suffers from two major problems. The first is that it seriously overloads on emotional high points. There were at least four separate points at which I thought that ANGIE had reached its climax, and what made that decision the most frustrating is that none of them quite provided the catharsis that ANGIE needed but always just missed. I got the feeling that Hollywood Pictures had tested several endings, found that the audiences responded to each one, and then decided to keep them all. Consequently, ANGIE loses its narrative momentum two thirds of the way through and coasts to the finish on its tear-jerking.
The second, and perhaps more distracting, problem is a rather personal distaste for what I perceived as a sell-out in the change in Angie's perspective which occurs at the end of the film. ANGIE begins as a story about a woman who feels trapped by her life trying to change it for the better through new experiences. When some of these new experiences don't turn out well, and Angie's life takes some disappointing turns, she seems to take all the wrong lessons away from those experiences. A speech Angie makes to her baby surprised me by suggesting that Angie believed her problem was thinking too much about herself, when I felt she was thinking about herself for the first time in her life. The fits and starts in the film's many climaxes left me wondering what it was that I was supposed to have learned from Angie's story.
It is a given that a film like ANGIE pulls emotional strings, and that in itself is not a failing. Manipulating our emotions is what films are supposed to do; the best ones just manage to do it so skillfully that we don't notice or don't care. ANGIE doesn't achieve that deft middle ground. It crosses its signals, piles on the pathos, and leaves its star to carry most of its emotional baggage.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 emotional climaxes: 5.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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