"Angie"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              March 12, 1994


     I'm still trying to sort out what I think about the new Martha Coolidge
film, "Angie" that has been playing in multiple theaters around the Bay area
for the last couple of weeks. Martha Coolidge is one of the more established
women directors in Hollywood, and while she has been known to deny that she's
a feminist, there are certainly what you might call feminist moments in her
films (recall the scene in "Ramblin' Rose" where the Diane Ladd character
stands up and tells her husband and the doctor what she thinks of their
conspiring to sterilize Rose).

   "Angie" is certainly a "woman's film" for the 1990s. That phrase used to
refer to a "weepy," a tearjerker that would show some woman dying for love of
a man, or sacrificing everything for her child, etc. These days films that are
made with a female audience clearly in mind aren't necessarily sad, and they
certainly don't always end in death or ruin. Several recently, including "Ruby
in Paradise" and now "Angie" find a happy ending in a young woman discovering
how to go on living her life on pretty much her own terms.

   Angie (Geena Davis) is a young working class Italian woman from Brooklyn
(Bensonhurst) who, with her best friend Tina (Aida Turturrco), works in an
office in Manhattan, has a long term relationship with an affable plumber
named Vinnie, and lives alone near her father and stepmother, whom she 
dislikes. When she gets pregnant everything and everybody says she and 
Vinnie should get married and live happily ever after. Except that Angie 
sees what Tina's marriage is like (the working class Brooklyn Italian man, 
if I may generalize, tends to be pretty patriarchal) and Angie has 
aspirations toward "culture" that are not shared by Vinnie. She gets involved 
with an Irish lawyer (Stephen Dea) she meets at the Metropolitan Museum of 
Art and announces that she's not marrying Vinnie.

   An overarching theme of the film is motherhood and how Angie, whose real
mother left the family to return to Texas when Angie was a small girl and who
has had a twenty-year battle with her stepmother, has herself somehow missed
learning how to mother that gets passed on (a la Nancy Chodorow) from one
generation to the next--and how she finally finds this connection. In the
process the film takes for granted that abortion wouldn't even be considered,
presumably because Angie's Catholic (though statistics show that Catholic women
women have as many abortions as anyone else) and that parenting is woman's work.
It lays a heavy guilt trip on anyone who, once having given birth, might not
want to raise her child, as well. It's all right, according to this film, for
her to do her child rearing without the help of a man, but it's not ok to
hand off the responsibility to someone else for any reason.

   What's refreshing about "Angie" is the use of people of all shapes and
sizes in various roles. There are fat women, tall women, black women, brown
women, short men. We see things no male filmmaker would ever put into a
mainstream film: vibrators and breast pumps and lots of dialogue that would
only be shared among women.

   Having lived in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1970s, I feel
qualified to say that Coolidge deserves high marks for creating pretty
believable local color--her Brooklyn working-class Italians are more realistic
than those in, say, "Moonstruck" or "Used People"--but, alas, "Angie," too,
has a shot of a preternaturally large full moon--something that inexplicably
has become de rigueur in any Hollywood film about New York Italians ever since
"Moonstruck."

   I'm not wild about this film, but I'm not sorry I went to see it.  It was
funny in some places and it is, on the whole, good to have a popular film out
there that depicts single motherhood as a preferable option to marriage with
an abusive or even a nice but incompatible man.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on women and film.

   Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.