Mad love

Remember Angel Baby at Oscar time

by Gary Susman

ANGEL BABY. Written and directed by Michael Rymer. With John Lynch, Jacqueline McKenzie, Colin Friels, and Deborra-Lee Furness. A Cinepix Film. Properties release. At the the Kendall Square.

Forget Hamlet and Ophelia. The season's most entertaining, passionate, and poignant mad romantics are John Lynch's Harry and Jacqueline McKenzie's Kate in Angel Baby. Written and directed by first-timer Michael Rymer, Angel Baby won a slew of Australian Film Institute awards in 1995, including best film, actor, actress, director, and screenplay. It would be a shame if the film were to be overshadowed by the post-Christmas Oscar hopefuls or ignored as part of the January-movie dumping ground.

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Click for an interview with actor John Lynch.

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Lynch, currently burning a hole in the screen as the charismatic IRA leader Bobby Sands in Some Mother's Son, is Harry, who, after a bout of unspecified mental illness (apparently schizophrenia), is putting his life back together with the help of his medication, his brother and sister-in-law (Colin Friels and Deborra-Lee Furness), and regular visits to a support group at a drop-in center for fellow outpatients. There, Harry meets Kate (Romper Stomper's Jacqueline McKenzie), a fellow outpatient, and is smitten.

Harry and Kate's torrid romance drives them toward an idyllic, ostensibly normal family existence. They move in together. They find jobs. They're elated when Kate becomes pregnant. To protect the fetus, Kate goes off her medication, as does Harry. Here, Harry and Kate run up against social convention, as doctors and relatives try to dissuade them from their decision, implicitly limiting the freedom they're willing to extend to this unusual couple. Of course, the movies often portray romance as antisocial, since it elevates the desires of two individuals above conformity to social norms. But Harry and Kate are also up against their own physical and psychological limits, and the consequences are severe.

The descent back into madness, of course, provides opportunities for these two actors to sink their teeth into the kind of bravura turns that can both awe and annoy an audience (and result in Academy Award nominations). Still, Lynch and McKenzie paint portraits of mental illness that transcend the usual film portrayals because of their sheer anger -- at those around them, at themselves, at their own helplessness. Harry and Kate are not frail, pitiable creatures but ordinary folks with an especially unbearable burden. Rymer's direction is unflinchingly intense, almost to the point of exhaustion.

Lynch, who specializes in brooding, touched types (as in The Secret Garden or The Secret of Roan Inish), has no trouble at all inhabiting Harry. McKenzie, though, is a revelation who never fails to make Kate convincing, even with some of the more ludicrous business Rymer's screenplay gives her. It's this silly streak that's the film's greatest weakness. Kate has some goofy notions that can't be written off as madness. She believes she has a guardian angel named Astral who communicates with her via the puzzle solutions on Wheel of Fortune. Harry goes along with this idea; like Kate, he comes to believe that their unborn child will be the human incarnation of Astral. The couple's belief in this guardian angel and their interpretation of her supposed messages is what leads to their most fateful and disastrous decisions.

It's one thing for movie characters to have a whimsical, new-agey, mystical streak. But in Harry and Kate, this belief -- especially in contrast to the Grinch-like skepticism of those who stand in their way -- is what's supposed to make them heroic, not just their struggles against mental illness and social repression. Here, Rymer falls into the fallacy of movies from The King of Hearts to Benny & Joon, from Forrest Gump to the current I'm Not Rappaport, which patronize both their mentally ill (or retarded or senile) characters and their audiences by suggesting that the mentally ill are holy fools who live more romantically, spiritually, passionately, truthfully, and completely than the rest of us. Contrast Angel Baby with another current Australian film, Shine, whose protagonist finds love and fulfillment despite, not because of, his mental illness.

Still, schizophrenia is no picnic in Angel Baby, and the difficulty of Harry and Kate's struggle makes the small measure of happiness they manage to wrest from their situation seem all the more precious and hard-won. That kind of honest victory is rare enough in life, rarer still in the movies.