AGNES OF GOD
O'Brien, Tom
Commonweal: 530 Screen AGNES OF GOD RUMORS OF REVELATIONS Agnes OF GOD is the fall's first Serious Film. It will no doubt be praised, if only for being a welcome relief from the summer's glut of...
...but Agnes is still holy hooey...
...In A Soldier's Story, his cool, realistic directorial style perfectly matched the plot of the play he was adapting, the slow discovery of the truth about the sergeant's murder by a cool, realistic army captain doing the prosecuting...
...With such repetitive punch-pulling, Agnes isn't gothic but gimmick...
...But in Agnes, the objective investigator is only one of three major characters — Fonda...
...By schema, Fonda and Bancroft are supposed to grow to like each other as the one probes, and the other protects, Agnes's fragile psyche...
...A compulsive smoker, Fonda offers Bancroft a cigarette, despite convent rules, which Bancroft accepts with a touch of naughty pleasure...
...To take the former first, Agnes is an unsuccessful adaptation, though not for obvious reasons...
...There are slipshod, undeveloped references to her former Catholicism, a frustrating scene with her mother in a nursing home that explains 4 October 1985: 531 nothing, and garbled allusions to a sister named Maria, which are supposed to establish a suggestive parallel with Agnes's visions...
...But then, reverting to form, she glibly talks of miracles...
...The church hierarchy, naturally, is portrayed as only being interested in hushing up the case as quickly as possible...
...Agnes herself, of course, talks of visits by "him," without clarifying whether this means God, St...
...But none of this quite hangs together to explain her militant rationalism or her passion to find out the truth...
...The Broadway success has been adapted by playwright John Pielmeier and the screenplay is directed by Norman Jewison, an Oscar winner for In the Heat of the Night and almost a repeater for last year's A Soldier's Story...
...But Jewison has no way to film her mind and give his Agnes the same power as Agnes on stage...
...Catholicism, the film implies, is really as creepy as we moderns always thought...
...But what we get is a spiritually upscale commercial for Virginia Slims...
...The mother superior initially gives the impression she believes the pregnancy may have been a miracle...
...title character...
...she conceals most of the facts about Agnes from the psychiatrist...
...What Agnes needs is a visual style that is, in moments at least, less lucid, or less rational — something Italian and medieval, not Dutch...
...The film's problems are many, both aesthetic and intellectual...
...Their vision of Agnes, particularly as she sits next to her window, was borrowed from Vermeer and his frequent depictions of clear shafts of light falling on women by windows...
...Jewison's style matches hers, but the substance of the rest remains strange, never fully assimilated...
...These episodes tease us into thinking Fonda will break the case...
...and, marking a return to the screen after four years of aerobic exercises, Jane Fonda as a court-appointed psychiatrist who attempts to find out what motivated Agnes, who got her pregnant, and — as the plot thickens — who else may have killed the baby...
...The "set-up" is evident from their first scene...
...On screen, Meg Tilly also achieves an incandescent intensity with such material in several selected moments...
...But with this particular subject, something else was needed besides literate fidelity...
...It is literate and adult...
...On stage, great performers can win for wild melodrama a willing suspension of disbelief (or of disapproval) by the sheer force of turbulent verbal energy...
...Even the "normal" side of the story is a disappointment...
...Fonda has remarked, with a degree of amazement, that some of the film's scenes are single-shot dialogues of ten or twelve minutes, a form "almost unheard of in movies nowadays...
...On the bare Broadway stage, the role of Agnes was tailor-made for flamboyant theatrics...
...Such emphasis on the spoken word indicates the film's theatrical roots, its concern with character and psychology...
...Ironically, Jewison did not help himself in this regard when he hired Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer...
...Often, however, they are photographed at angles showing us crucifixes in the background — insistently reminding us of the convent as an expression of Christianity — or, even more pointedly, making sure we see pictures of John Paul II...
...At one point Fonda is surreptitiously told by a crone-like nun to "search the basement files...
...Agnes' s plot is also annoying, on several grounds...
...Jewison has enlisted big names for the key roles: Meg Tilly (of The Big Chill) as the mad — or is it mystic...
...Despite being given touches of sophistication, Bancroft has to play her role with a strange know-nothingism...
...It will no doubt be praised, if only for being a welcome relief from the summer's glut of teenpix...
...Amanda Plummer made the most of it, with her bizarre descriptions of angels, or a mysterious "Sister Maria," or St...
...she is shocked but apparently does nothing when confronted with evidence that Agnes's state of mind may be rooted in peculiarly repellent experiences of child abuse...
...Their talk turns to saints and what they would be doing if they were alive now...
...Agnes also plays fast and loose with the miraculous in an annoying manner...
...At times we are told that the nuns in the convent practice very "ancient" rules, and that they do not represent contemporary Catholicism...
...it's an abrupt rush to get at Significance, in which both she and Bancroft seem merely to be servicing the script...
...But nothing of significance results from this — or from later revelations that Bancroft knew of Agnes's pregnancy all along and that a secret passageway may have been used by Agnes for a romantic (mystical...
...The only honest priest is a kindly codger who — just to show us he is on the side of the angels — offers the psychiatrist a drink and clearly enjoys his own...
...They no sooner meet than they hoist their colors with several I-know-what- you -represent routines...
...We never get to see "him" — a discordant element when Jewison presents us, otherwise, with an omniscient camera...
...TOM O'BRIEN Commonweal: 532...
...At times, Agnes slides into a rip-off of Christian symbols for their shock value, more like Rosemary's Baby than a virgin birth...
...Even her closing monologue conceding the possibility of miracles is too brief to provide her character depth...
...it's harder to be swept away when the visuals keep on reinforcing the solidity of the here and now...
...Screen neutralizes the spoken word...
...In the few scenes where Jewison tries to film her visionary experiences, however, this "him" acts more like a demon lover than anyone either sacred or profane...
...But with a realistic director using a contemporary setting, film is less hospitable to sensation and hysteria...
...When she does, she discovers that Anne Bancroft is really Agnes's aunt...
...Perhaps he should have hired Bergman himself for his gift of familiarizing the strange...
...One scene, set in a gazebo inside the nunnery grounds, is supposed to climax this...
...Jewison wanted to create "a complete world of its own," and Nykvist wanted to photograph it in crisp, northern light...
...But then their talk degenerates into what the saints would be smoking...
...In Agnes Jewison tackles a faintly similar story: the investigation of alleged infanticide by a disturbed young nun moments after she gives birth to her baby...
...Fonda and Bancroft break into a case of schoolgirl giggles...
...Michael the Archangel, hovering in the air outside her convent window...
...Nykvist's work is exquisite, especially when matched with the choice of a secluded boys' school in Canada as the convent where the murder and investigation take place...
...When Bancroft does escape from caricature, she becomes a contradiction...
...Pielmeier and Jewison exploit all the ingredients of the who-dun-it, but then provide, at the most, only half-answers...
...she exhibits an unusually casual attitude when Agnes suddenly receives the stigmata — something a superior would be bound to summon appropriate ecclesiastical agencies to investigate...
...Michael, or a human father...
...Fonda's character is more shadowy...
...The mother superior is supposed to have been a woman of the world — we are told she was married and had children before entering the convent...
...We come close here to Merton's Life and Holiness, and its examination of sanctity in any setting...
...So far, one thinks, all well and good...
...But those were women of the world — with jugs, guitars, or letters in hand...
...Anne Bancroft as the mother superior who tries to shield the young nun during the investigation...
...Pielmeier's idea of contrasting faith and reason in the views of the mother superior and the psychiatrist is sound, but as actually treated here their conflict becomes forced and stereotypical...
...assignation...
...they turn out to be leads that amount to very little...
...the laughter is supposed to represent the kind of bonhomie, signaling mutual respect, that strong rivals sometimes develop/ But, like other elements in the film, I found the scene hard to fathom: Pielmeier wants a symbol of contemporary spirituality, a common point where mother superior and psychiatrist can meet, but then seizes on — smoking...
...Screen can be a potent source of magic, or a convincing medium for the sensational...
...Pace Fonda, this is not one of the scenes with ten to twelve minutes of dialogue...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
