Falling Angels (27 page)

The White Bone

• Finalist for the Trillium Award
  
• Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
  
• Finalist for the Giller Prize
  
• Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
  

The Romantic

• Nominated for the Man Booker Prize
  
• Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
  
• Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book
  
• Finalist for the Trillium Award
  

Falling Angels
was made into a feature film in 2003. This article by Liam Lacey about the making of the film first appeared in
The Globe and Mail
on November 14, 2003.

There’s Lou, rebellious and superior; Sandy, pretty as a doll, naive and promiscuous; and Norma, the kind of girl who strives to please her parents. The story of
Falling Angels
is about three sisters—not the sisters of Chekhov, or the daughters of King Lear—but teenage girls growing up in the planned community of Don Mills, Ontario, in the late sixties. Barbara Gowdy’s breakthrough 1989 novel,
Falling Angels,
juxtaposed banal surfaces (suburbia, high-school gym classes) and wild events (infanticide, entrapment) in an eerie mix of black humour and catastrophe.

Falling Angels
… was not Gowdy’s first book. That was
Through the Green Valley,
a conventional historical novel, published in 1988, about a 19th-century Irish family emigrating to the New World. The title wasn’t hers, and while she says “the research was impeccable,” this was not the kind of writing she wanted to do. With
Falling Angels,
published a year later, she found her writing voice.

There was a prevailing belief in CanLit, she says, that “if writing is humorous, it can’t have depth.” Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s example, she wrote a book set in the suburbs where she grew up and found, within the constraints of middle-class Toronto life, enough bizarre events for any potboiler: A ►
father who keeps his family confined in a fallout shelter; an infanticide; and a creepy ménage à trois between twin middle-aged men and a teenage girl.

The novel was an international success and was optioned several times for film. Eight years ago, Vancouver director Scott Smith, then in the residency program at the Canadian Film Centre, first read the novel and fell in love with “the blend of calamity and humour.” He made inquiries about directing the film, but he was told he was too young (he was 25) and inexperienced.

Then came
Kissed,
Vancouver director Lynn Stopkewich’s 1996 film based on Gowdy’s short story about a young woman who works in a funeral parlour and loves a corpse. Stopkewich was slated to direct
Falling Angels,
but when she became sidetracked with a documentary on the Lilith Fair tour, she suggested Scott Smith would be a good choice. His first feature,
Rollercoaster,
showed his talents for working with young actors.

Producer Robin Cass, who optioned the book back in the mid-nineties and “had gone through several brick walls to get the film made,” was initially reluctant about Smith. Everyone felt the film should have a woman director.

“I said I’d be proud to have a sex change,” says Smith.

In the end, with Stopkewich vouching for Smith’s talents, the producers decided to go ahead. Screenplay writer Esta Spalding (
The Republic of Love)
made some significant changes to the story, including turning Lou’s
boyfriend, a John Lennon-ish English kid, into an American. Spalding also changed the ending to one that is more of a reconciliation.

Gowdy, who has been working on a screenplay herself for the past year with author and journalist Marni Jackson, knows that a movie and a novel “have completely different kinds of momentum.” Gowdy had only one real requirement, according to Smith: “Keep my characters.”

Gowdy says Smith captured not only the three girls (actresses Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams and Monté Gagné), but also the parents (played by Callum Keith Rennie and Miranda Richardson). As for the narrative changes, she appreciates that the visual imagination replaces the authorial interior monologue, which has certain narrative consequences.

Mostly, her reaction to the film is one of praise: “I’ve learned that getting a film made requires not one miracle but a series of them.”

Smith wanted to retain Gowdy’s main thematic concern, which is war—the war within the family, the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular. Gowdy had once told Smith that the book was about what war did to men and men did to women. He saw it, more specifically, as being about a girl (Lou) recognizing her own role in perpetuating “the trap of war” that raged in her family. All of them are busy striving to appear normal, while hiding their family secret.

To find the right emotional tone, Smith was careful to be accurate to the period—from the girls’ school jumpers to ►
the architecture of the homes—but also to create a heightened world. His colour palette consists of baby blue, rose and gold.

The exteriors are all brightly lit and look subtly but distinctly late sixties. There’s a good reason for that. One of Smith’s pet peeves is period pictures that look as though they were photographed with modern techniques.

So he looked around to get the right lenses. He found the Cooke camera lenses, which were state of the art in the late sixties. He was told the same camera lenses were used to shoot Mike Nichols’
Carnal Knowledge.

Smith also wanted to find the right suburbia. Don Mills is now far too tree-lined to represent itself in 1968, and in any case, there were various tax-credit options available for shooting out West.

“We had the use of this new soundstage in Regina, and we thought we could shoot there. As soon as we got there, we saw the whole place was covered in trees—3,000 elms were planted there in the 1940s. All the interior scenes were shot in Regina. Fortunately, we heard that we might find the right neighbourhood in Moose Jaw and got another tax credit for shooting there.”

“It’s a place without shadows,” says Scott,“which is exactly what I wanted. Even the interiors are shot the same way. It’s the idea of something being hidden in plain sight.”

—Reprinted with permission from
The Globe and Mail

Early in my friendship with Barbara Gowdy, I was a dinner guest at her apartment on Walmer Road. I think it was the one on Walmer Road—she’s moved eighteen times, so I’m not entirely sure. I was already a fan of
We So Seldom Look on Love,
which I found nervy, original, tender and comic. In particular, her care with language was stunning; each sentence felt resonant and solid, the way the door on an expensive car feels when you slam it.

I had brought along the sort of eager dinner-guest gift that perhaps says too much—a set of painted Russian nesting dolls, four varnished female figures, diminishing in size, right down to the tiniest peanut-sized one. I think it reflected my sense that Barbara contains many ages at once. She can be fifty, fifteen or five. With her dark, bright eyes, floating bangs and quick gestures, she still looks like the smartest girl in English class, hand up and waving, hoping the teacher will choose her first. At the same time, she has a mother-lion maternalism that kicks in whenever she comes to the defence of a friend, ►
or a principle she believes in. One of these principles is the humane treatment of animals and other innocent creatures.

Barbara lives on the edge of a park in downtown Toronto, where she maintains a stewardly relationship with the urban animals that share her environment. Arthritic raccoons are lucky to slide down her eavestrough; they will be treated well. Her own housecat began life as an abused, abandoned, semi-feral animal that she rescued from the pound. But the cat kept pouncing on her feet and clawing at them, or scratching her face as she slept. Most of us would take the cat back, or at least cage it. Instead, Barbara caged herself; she had a special wrought-iron and glass curtain built for her doorless bedroom. In this way, the cat could have the run of the house at night, as cats prefer to do, while she remained sequestered.

It was a long process, but the animal eventually learned to trust her and was transformed; she became glossy, calm, happy and almost Cheshire cat-like in composure. I imagine that fictional characters, in their feral beginnings, can be as unruly, chaotic and unpromising as that cat. The same principles she demonstrates in her treatment of other creatures, Barbara brings to the care and maintenance of her fictional characters, some of whom are flawed, damaged or marginalized. She allows them to rule the roost. She serves them. She believes they deserve her total focus, loyalty and care. In this way, her characters are allowed to be strange,
uncivilized, damaged or dangerous. With proper attention, empathy and patience, an abused animal has a chance to become the creature it was meant to be. In the same way, the vulnerable or contradictory characters that populate Barbara’s writing are allowed to become fully human on the page.

During the long, self-doubting process of building the world of a novel, she hovers over and shelters these not-quite beings until they achieve full stature. She wants her cats and her characters to assume their true lives. And she will do whatever she has to, arranging her life around their survival, to ensure that they flourish.

I could see this curious, unrushed process at work, in a different form, when we recently collaborated on a screenplay for a feature film.

The story is not an adaptation of her work, but an original idea—a darkish romantic comedy about two young girls, set in the north, called
Spa Talk.
That project emerged from our friendship, which began about sixteen years ago when we both found ourselves contributing to a bygone enterprise called
The Journal of Wild Culture.
Barbara edited a piece of mine, in her light, whip-smart way, and I thought: “Hmmm, she knows what she’s doing.”

When we embarked on the script, each of us had just emerged from long, demanding projects. Barbara had published
The Romantic,
and I had published a non-fiction book on the nature of pain. We were up for company, and laughs. We often kibitzed about the musical comedies we should write ►
together—The Hindenburg, for instance, with a finale in which a zeppelin sails out over the audience and bursts into flame. Barbara has perfect pitch, and knows all the words to broadway shows. How hard could a screenplay be? So we got down to work.

That was three years ago. We gave our successive drafts women’s names. I think we stopped at “Uma.” But we’re not quite done yet. The problem is, inventing new characters is a bit like growing sea monkeys: once you get a few little brine shrimp swimming about, it becomes impossible to kill them off. You can’t just flush them down the toilet; you have to keep feeding them, and see what happens. We have a producer, a story editor, some funding from Telefilm—and we’re waiting to see if it makes it to the screen.