Angela

United States

1995

99 Min

Color

English

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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CAST Miranda Rhyne, Charlotte Eve Blythe, Anna Thomson, John Ventimiglia, Vincent Gallo, Peter Facinelli, Frances Conroy, Ruth Maleczech, Garrett Bemer

SOUND Stefan Springman

Sundance (Dramatic Competition): Cinematography Award, Filmmakers Trophy, Stockholm (American Independents)

Synopsis

Angela (age 10) and Ellie (age 6) live in Catskill, New York, a run-down town that business and industry have fled. Their mother, Mae, a beautiful, glamorous, eccentrically-dressed woman, has had to abandon her singing career because of an increasingly severe case of manic depression. Their father, Andrew, an earthy ex-musician, has made a pact not to put Mae on lithium; it kills her “spirit.” In an effort to give the girls a “bland” experience to counteract the unpredictability of their lives, Andrew, himself an atheist, starts taking the family to church. He has no idea how powerfully the ideas embodied by Christianity will affect Angela, who becomes obsessed by the idea of sin. Angela convinces herself that the cleaner of sin she and her sister are, the happier their mother will be. To this end, she creates rituals to effect the inner purification of herself and her sister. Gradually, Angela moves further and further into the world of her own visionary imagination. –inbaseline

Director

Rebecca Miller

Born two years after her father divorced Marilyn Monroe, the multi-talented Rebecca Miller is the only child of renowned playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. After an enviable childhood growing up in a family of artists, she studied painting at Yale before acting in theater productions on the East Coast. Following a small part in the NBC movie The Murder of Mary Phagan, she made her feature film debut with a sizable role in the West German film Georg Elser — Einer aus Deutschland. She started her filmmaking career in 1990, making the short film Florence and directing a production of her father’s play After the Fall for the New York stage. She continued acting throughout the early ‘90s, playing Harrison Ford’s mistress in Regarding Henry, Kevin Spacey’s wife in Consenting Adults, and Cliff Robertson’s daughter in Wind. She played a couple of other supporting film roles (including a portrayal of commercial artist Neysa McMein in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle) before… read more