Birthpsychology at the Movies

Angie*  (Hollywood Pictures, 1994)
Reviewed by David Chamberlain

"Geena Davis is hilarious ... stunningly natural ... gives the performance of her career" the critics say about the spring 1994 release, "Angie" by Hollywood Pictures. All true, but underneath this comedy is perinatal street theatre brought to you in living color.

Angie, growing up in an Italian family in Brooklyn in the 70's, was four when divorce separated her from her mother; she's given no explanation by her father, who suffers in silence and tells nothing to a daughter he assumes is incapable of understanding. We watch this growing child, poisoned by the silence, act out her unresolved feelings toward her father and the new stepmother she couldn't accept, as she clutches the one photo she has of her mother holding her in arms. Father won't answer her questions, relationships are wooden and tense, and anger is always seeping through the cracks of their pretend "family" relationships.

This beautiful (and funny) young lady tries to create her own life story, but she is shadowed by unfinished business: her longings to know, see, and talk with the mother she lost. And then, Angie's pregnant. She rejects the baby's father and amidst uncertain relationships, approaches the birth with a mixture of despair and hope. When the time comes, we witness a hospital birth turned into hysteria by nurses, doctor and her girlfriend "Lamaze Coach. " Angie's baby arrives with a club wrist and refuses to nurse.

Feeling rejected herself, Angie leaves her yet unnamed baby boy in the arms of her step-mother and takes flight by Greyhound to find her mother in Texas.

The mother she finds is blank-faced, speechless, and schizophrenic, but Angie goes ahead with the long-postponed reunion in a touching monologue that resolves old issues. She quickly recalculates her life and relationships.

When news reaches her from Brooklyn that her baby is in the hospital, unconscious and dying, she races to his incubator, ready, at last, to be his mother. Facing yet another speechless person, she plunges into a tender monologue explaining herself, pleading with him to live, and fully committing to be his mother. She asks him to think about what she has said and then sits back to await his response. Hours later, the night vigil ends as he awakens from unconsciousness! His revival sets in motion a wave of joy among the other babies in the NICU. (The nurse who knows these babies has told us how mysteriously they communicate with one another and how they have been rooting for this one.) It is a treat to watch the many faces of Angie throughout this movie, but never more so than in the closing dialog when she offers her breast and the baby takes it gladly.

The movie "Angie" is packed with themes familiar in pre-and perinatal psychotherapy: separation and loss, angry bewilderment, patterning of relationships, the catalytic power of pregnancy and birth, the psychic confrontation of mother and baby, the impasse, the desperate journey for reconciliation, and resolution.

Angie's climactic achievement of a life-saving bond makes this movie not only a satisfying comedy but a pre- and perinatal thriller.

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*The movie is based on the book, Angie, I Says by Avra Wing (Warner Books, New York, 1992.)