The writer's entire life was a struggle for definition, a fight against the unbearable amorphousness of being. With Frame as its subject, perhaps the film was destined to have a muddled heart. We're shown everything - the poverty-stricken childhood, the family disasters, the years shut away in a mental hospital, where she was incorrectly diagnosed as schizophrenic and given more than 200 applications of shock therapy - and yet we feel as if something crucial has been left out, something essential. This comprehensive urge is a virtue, but it's a strangely unsatisfying one. The film, which was designed as a three-part miniseries for Australian TV, follows the tragic life of the New Zealand author Janet Frame, and Campion's intention, it seems, was to capture every formative incident in the artist's biography, every classroom humiliation, every family disaster, every romantic blind alley and cruel twist of fate. Jane Campion's "An Angel at My Table" is a big, sprawling, unshapely thing, insufferably verbose and, at the same time, touched with magnificence.
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