ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 6, 1996 TAG: 9604090057
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: MOVIE REVIEW
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
``Won't you sit down and see if the moths mistake you for the moon the way the butterflies mistook you today for the flowers and the sky?"
Never has a more beautiful pick-up line been so utterly wasted on its object as in Philip and Belinda Haas' quietly mesmerizing "Angels & Insects," based on the novel "Morpho Eugenia" by A.S. Byatt.
It's not that Eugenia Alabaster (Patsy Kensit) isn't beautiful. It's just that she is not what she seems to the humble naturalist William Adamson (Mark Rylance), who has just returned from a nearly disastrous trip to the Amazon. To Mr. Adamson, a beautiful thing is merely a beautiful thing - to be studied, admired and, if luck is on his side, captured forever.
Luck - or what seems to be luck - is certainly with him where Eugenia is concerned. Her father, a benefactor of Mr. Adamson's, is rich, and Mr. Adamson, who has no lineage, has lost all that he had in a shipwreck, returning from South America. Eugenia needs to be married off before her sister, Rowena. And Eugenia's previous fiance died suddenly just before the marriage was to take place - under mysterious circumstances.
So married they will be, Eugenia and William, and all would seem to be well under the Alabasters' handsome roof. But this is a strange piece of Victoriana, so things are definitely not what they seem.
That is what the insects are here to teach us - and we don't need to travel as far as the rain forest to receive their instruction. At least that's the viewpoint of Matilda Compton, governess of the innumerable Alabaster children, who becomes William's friend and confidante as he finds himself frequently shut out of his wife's life and, in particular, her bedroom.
Miss Compton, played by Kristin Scott Thomas (the interesting looking woman that Hugh Grant takes for granted in ``Four Weddings and a Funeral"), has made her own study of things. And as she teaches William how to look more closely at what is "close at hand," he draws closer to the truth about his wife and his marriage.
Philip Haas, who directed this movie and co-wrote it with his wife, Belinda Haas, sometimes thunks along a little too heavily as he draws parallels between the life of insects and the life of these human beings. But I'm not sure the laughs some of the paired images produce are unintentional. The obese, powdered Lady Alabaster is certainly meant to be an object of ridicule as she stuffs herself with teacakes like a feeding queen in the ant colony.
That leaves us with an unmistakable and rather silly moral that I can't talk about without revealing a major plot point.
Suffice it to say that "Angels & Insects" at times skates on rather thin ice. But it is still an intense, interesting study of the Victorians who, under the gaze of these filmmakers, appear as oblivious of their own free will as the ants in the colony. When freedom finally does present itself in the story, it is as refreshing as a gust of wind through a stuffy room - but with the unmistakable power to blow the fragile things away.
Angels & Insects *** 1/2
A Playhouse International-Samuel Goldwyn release showing at The Grandin Theatre. Unrated, but it contains several sexually explicit scenes and full frontal nudity. 117 mins.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 linesby CNB