Rock solid

>> Kari Skogland on her bold adaptation of
Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

HARD-HEADED WOMAN: Ellen Burstyn

by MATTHEW HAYS

Virtually anyone who attended high school in Canada, or did an undergraduate degree in the Great White North, has read the book. Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, about an ornery woman who takes off on a road trip after her children threaten to place her in a nursing home, is now an iconic bit of CanLit. It’s a great book, full of insight and depth, but it’s also one that has been dubbed unfilmable.

Which prompts the obvious question: why take on an adaptation based on something so familiar that many are bound to have gripes about how it appears onscreen? “I was terrified,” writer-director Kari Skogland says of her big screen take on the Laurence classic. “And I don’t know why Margaret Laurence chose me. But she did. I had been looking for a project for some time, but nothing was grabbing me. There it was, on my bookshelf. I thought to myself, ‘Should I?’”

Skogland’s take on The Stone Angel is masterful and deft; strong performances breathe life into these familiar characters, reminding the audience of just how strong the source material is, without ever seeming too reverential. In other words, it’s a winning adaptation—a very, very difficult feat.

For Skogland, there was a double epiphany involved—one she had at age 14 when she first read the book, and again, when she revisited it as an adult. “It was amazing to read as a 14-year-old,” she recalls. “That’s an age when you’re very self-centred, and here’s this book that takes you deep into the interior of one woman, and through her you certainly learn about what comes with age. But as a teen, you can’t read into all of it because you just don’t have the life experience. This struck me as a very unique female story, one we hadn’t heard before.”

This story has Hagar Shipley being shunted into a nursing home by her two children. Furious at the prospect, the elder woman—despite her rapidly diminishing mental faculties—heads off on a journey to an abandoned house she vaguely recalls. While en route, she reflects on her past life, and the emotional events that make her who she is.

Sans sugar

Skogland concedes there was something heavenly about getting her cast together, one that includes Ellen Page and names like Luke Kirby and Sheila McCarthy. But getting Ellen Burstyn, one of America’s most respected actors, was “some kind of great serendipity thing,” says Skogland. “She read the script and was on board very early on. She asked, ‘How hard is this woman?’ Then she went for it. She knew she was a great character, and there was no way she was going to hold back—she didn’t want to sugar-coat it in any way.”

Approaching Laurence’s book meant being respectful but also being courageous. “I don’t even think it’s about making the material your own, I think it’s about making it right for the medium. Reading is not a passive thing. You can get inside someone’s head with the written word, and that often doesn’t translate so precisely to film. I pulled out a lot of the intellectual stuff, the metaphors for example. We tried to shoot a couple of them, but they didn’t work, so they’re not in the final cut. I peeled away a lot of the digressions. If it didn’t serve the story, it basically had to go. In the end, I feel it was very true to the book’s story and characters.”

And amid all the ongoing arguments about how to get more Canadians to see Canadian movies, how does Skogland feel about the charge that English-Canadian cinema is just too damn grim for its own good?

“They might be right. This movie has its grim side. But it’s also funny. It’s truthful. It’s about the circle of life. Life doesn’t pull a punch. Grim? Maybe. I tried to have as much of the humour come through as was possible. You can’t soften a book like this. People who know it, they know watching it is going to be an experience.”

The Stone Angel opens
this Friday, May 9

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