Rent An Angel at My Table (1990)

An angel also in my screen - An Angel at My Table review by JD

I have never heard of Janet Frame or any of her books but I found this account of her life very moving. There are moments of beautifully acted grief and the sense of childhood pain is constant. I found the fairly obvious boot polish on her teeth, as an attempt to portray decay, a little distracting, but overall I recommend this as a moving biography.

An Angel At My Table - An Angel at My Table review by CP Customer

This film was laborious to watch. Being biographical, there was no plot, which in itself was not unexpected but the film just didn't take off. Any twists were obvious a mile off.

Framed - An Angel at My Table review by griggs

Writer biopics have a built-in problem: watching someone stare into space, then scribble for a bit, is not naturally cinematic. Jane Campion gets around that for a while in An Angel at My Table, treating Janet Frame’s memoirs less like a prestige biopic and more like an anecdotal coming-of-age story. That helps. You care about Janet as a person rather than as a Great Writer in waiting.

The first act has real life to it, and Campion is good at catching small humiliations, awkwardness and fleeting moments of hope without laying it on too thick. But the loose, episodic approach that feels so fresh early on gradually starts to drift. Incidents pile up, the shape goes soft, and the film begins to feel its length. By the end it picks up a bit, but never quite gets back what it had at the start.

All three actors playing Janet are good, with Karen Fergusson perhaps the standout. Campion’s refusal to force conventional drama is admirable. At 158 minutes, though, admirable and absorbing are not always the same thing.

There are fewer writer-biopic clichés than usual.

There are also, regrettably, rather a lot of minutes.