You
could say that Rebecca Miller was born into the artistic life. Her parents are photographer
Inge Morath and dramatist Arthur Miller. At the time of her birth 32 years ago,
Miller’s parents roomed at New York’s famed residence of artists, the Chelsea
Hotel.
Miller’s path to filmmaking was not a direct one. She began her artistic
career as a painter and sculptor working with dream imagery and mixed media
presentations that incorporated film within the work. She has also had acting
roles in films such as Mike Nichols’ Regarding Henry, Wind, and
Alan J. Pakula’s Consenting Adults, as well as directing for the stage,
most notably the Cincinnati premiere of her father’s play, After the
Fall. In 1990, Miller made a half-hour short film called Florence about a woman who is so empathetic that she catches a neighbor’s amnesia.
Angela, shot in 1994, is the writer-director’s first feature film.
A little over one year ago, Miller stood on the stage at the 1995 Sundance
Film Festival while accepting two awards for her debut movie. Angela was
honored with the Filmmakers Trophy, which is chosen exclusively by all the
filmmakers in competition. Angela‘s director of photography Ellen Kuras
(Swoon, Unzipped, Postcards from America) was also
recognized with the award for best dramatic feature cinematography. One year
after the acclaim, Angela is slowly filtering into theatres
cross-country (it opens in Austin this Friday at the Dobie Theatre) and in
anticipation of the event, Miller visited Austin last month.
The central characters in the movie are 10-year-old Angela (Miranda Stuart
Rhyne) and her six-year-old sister Ellie (Charlotte Blythe). They live with
their father Andrew (John Ventimiglia) and mother Mae (Anna Thomson), who is
manic-depressive and on a constant roller coaster of emotional highs and lows.
Though the erratic mood swings of Mae’s mental illness govern their lives, the
movie is told from the children’s point of view. Led by Angela, the girls
indulge in disturbing fantasy lives that are ruled by God and Lucifer, the
latter of whom appears to them in the form of a hunky angel with broken wings.
Their gothic fantasy life is lent further fuel when their father takes them to
church in an attempt to bring some normalcy to their lives. Engaged by the
mysticism and pageantry of Christianity, the religious iconography mixes with
the growing social awareness and emotional development of the two girls.
To a certain degree, the girls behave as though their actions can affect the
happiness of their mother. If they perform certain rituals and deeds, they feel
that the Devil can be kept at bay. “There’s that magical equivalency,” comments
Miller, “that sense that you can weigh sins, that you can enumerate them and
absolve them by doing a certain amount of Hail Marys.”
“In a sense, Mae is their god,” says Miller. “When cavemen were inventing god,
it was the thunder, and the lightning, and all the unpredictable things that
controlled their lives that they named holy. It is a similar thing with
children. The mother has a tremendous power over their happiness or unhappiness
and how their lives go. And if the mother is as unpredictable as the weather,
then they’re going to start to invent rituals to control that weather. So, in
that sense, those two girls are inventing religion all over again.”
Angela is unusual in that it shows, from their own perspective, the
emotional instability and turbulence faced by these young girls. And in doing
so, the movie resists filtering their world through more sophisticated lenses.
These are children who are not yet versed in the conceptual terminology that
might help them understand their situation, nor have they the life experiences
that might explain the irregularities of their lives. “It’s a movie that’s all
about things that don’t have much adult vocabulary attached to them —
spiritual feelings and emotions,” explains Miller.
Mae, herself, is something of a cipher — a voluptuous, peroxide-blonde in the
Marilyn Monroe mold who used to sing in a band with her husband Andrew.
(Psychoanalytically inclined viewers might want to speculate about some
internalized Monroe influence here since Miller’s father, Arthur, was married
to the screen goddess years before his daughter’s birth, although the director
insists that Mae’s physical evolution was due more to the ideas of the actress
playing her than anything ordained in the script.) Clearly, Mae’s recognition
of her fading beauty contributes to her psychological problems, and the
messages sent to her pre-adolescent daughters exacerbate the already confusing
nature of this stage in a girl’s development. Explains Miller, “Mae doesn’t
really have an identity though she has an idea of glamour about her. In part
it’s the bankruptcy of that ideal that causes a lot of problems with the whole
family.”
Miller sees her filmmaking as part of the same artistic process she’s been
involved in throughout her life. Whether painting, acting, writing, or
directing, “it all does belong to the same journey,” she says. “They all inform
each other.” As far as making a personal, independently financed feature film,
Miller admits, “it’s tough and you have to carve a niche for yourself when
there isn’t one.” As she begins work on her next film, it’s no won-der she
keeps those sculpting tools close by. n
This article appears in February 23 • 1996 and February 23 • 1996 (Cover).
