THE STONE ANGEL
by Daren Foster

by Daren Foster

The Stone Angel. Three words that will make any Canadian high school graduate break out in a cold sweat, hives and, quite possibly, uncontrollable fits of sobbing.

Margaret Laurence’s 1964 novel has been an academic hazing ritual inflicted on a generation or two of students despite its multifaceted inappropriateness for almost anyone who isn’t an octogenarian. If someone fondly recalls loving the book when they first read it in grade 12 and got an A on an essay about it, there’s a good chance that person eventually went on to form a book club. Or they’re lying through their teeth.

Narrated by an unlikable but feisty 90 year-old old coot, Hagar Shipley, the book is one long bitter reminiscence of a life badly led, filled with poor choices, willful stubbornness and one regret followed by another. In other words, perfect fare for 17 year-olds. It is a hellish 10 chapter slog that only winds up reminding the young reader of their torturous, twice yearly enforced visits to a dyspeptic, slightly off-smelling relative who no one can actually remember exactly how they’re related.

Given the rather grim view I hold of the book, it seems strange that I would decide to go see the movie adaptation now playing in select theatres. Maybe I thought that thirty years after our initial encounter, Hagar might resonate with a more mature version of me. The road of my life has become pockmarked with failure, realizations of personal defects, shortcomings and deep, unrelenting bitterness. There have been those occasional moments when I’ve caught that old man whiff wafting from my pores. Perhaps the time had come for a critical reassessment.

Besides, despite its dense prose style, there was a lot of cinematic potential in the structure of The Stone Angel. Told through the lens of an old woman’s memories, a traditional narrative arc could be jettisoned in favour of a fractured, free-flowing story where the past and present are in perpetual battle for supremacy, often supplanting and always contradicting each other. An aging protagonist with suspect remembrances can make for an unpredictable, thought provoking movie.

Unfortunately, it was neither of these. Almost immediately, I came to the horrifying realization that I would be subjected to the teeth-grinding boredom visited upon me three decades earlier. What was particularly galling was that it was entirely self-inflicted. Graduation and acceptance into university were not riding on any essay that would be due after the closing credits. What kept me from totally collapsing into an incomprehensibly dense particle of compressed despair and anguish was knowing that the agony would all be over in less than two hours rather than an entire term of 8:30 classes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.

Problems with the movie began from the get-go as I found myself struck by the fact Hagar’s long suffering son, Marvin, was talking into a cell phone. If nothing else, the novel has a very firm grounding in a particular time and place, that of the fictional Manitoba prairie town of Manawaka in the mid-1960s. Hagar was looking back on a life that had begun 90 years earlier, during the Victorian era and less than a decade after Canadian Confederation. By updating The Stone Angel into the present day, writer/director Kari Skogland blatantly disregards the contextual history of Laurence’s characters.

Is this merely critical nitpicking? I don’t think so. While things may change more slowly in rural towns, to assume there’s little difference in perspectives, mores or attitudes in the late-1800s versus the Great Depression of the 1930s (the teenage years of a present day 90 year-old) is to be oblivious to the monumental cultural shockwaves that occurred over the course of those 50 years. An elderly Hagar Shipley in 2008 would be a significantly different elderly Hagar Shipley than Margaret Laurence created in 1964.

Perhaps Skogland felt that the particulars of aging, of class, of societal boundaries and barriers resonated less than the more universal themes of pride, arrogance, acceptance and forgiveness. But without specifics, universalities are empty platitudes. I suspect budgetary constraints played a hand in the creative decision making process, restricting period reconstruction to just the one nebulous time, way back when, where the kids were dirtier, the cars had whitewall tires and even church sanctioned married sex was mysterious and toe-curlingly illicit. Such an ill-defined and generic past inevitably leads to a vague and unsatisfying present.

Equally problematic is the film’s pedestrian use of flashbacks. Memories tend to be fleeting things, emotional snippets that aren’t usually very reliable as official documentation. Filmmakers should embrace these qualities and use them accordingly. Unfortunately, most don’t including Skogland who delivers plodding and chronological flashbacks that simply stop any potential forward momentum instead of enhancing it. When an audience can sense a flashback coming before it arrives, the effect of the device is lost and becomes nothing more than a storytelling crutch. Throw in a couple underdeveloped, orphaned voice-overs and you’re witnessing a film adaptation that manifestly squandered its opportunities to bring a novel to cinematic life.

As I was leaving the theatre, I overheard another patron complain about movies that go back and forth in time. Apparently, she finds them too confusing. Perhaps the filmmakers recognized this as a general audience assessment and structured the narrative time shifting to be as straightforward as possible. Maybe even the best adaptation of The Stone Angel was bound to fail in finding a wide audience. Hopefully, we’ll never have the chance to find out for sure as that would mean risking another close encounter with story that’s already snatched too much of my life already.

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But, hey. I’m not angry.. particularly. I’m mature enough to admit defeat and accept the fact that maybe we just aren’t all that compatible, Hagar Shipley and me. I’ll even shoulder more than my share of the responsibility, admitting to the possibility of being too shallow, too emotionally stunted to fully comprehend the essence that makes The Stone Angel such a treasured albeit widely unloved Canadian classic. What rankles, however, is that the filmmakers seemed equally at a loss with their source material. It causes one to ponder how no one realized it in time to stop production long before the movie ever made it to the screen and could inflict further psychic damage on future generations.

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