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A Rumor of Angels Starring Trevor Morgan, Ron Livingston, Ray Liotta, Catherine McCormack and Vanessa Redgrave Written by James Eric, Jamie Horton and Peter O'Fallon Based on the book Thy Son Liveth: Messages from a Soldier's Mother by Grace Duffie Boylen Directed by Peter O'Fallon no website

IN SHORT: Find a novelization and read it instead. [Rated PG-13. 95 minutes]

Somewhere on the coast of Massachusetts is a town so small that it's cheaper to close a road than to fix a bridge that was damaged in a car accident two years earlier. The accident was the same one that killed young Jimmy Neubauer's mom. The twelve year old James (Trevor Morgan) we meet in Peter O'Fallon's A Rumor of Angels has never come to terms with the accident though his dad, Nathan (Ray Liotta), has remarried (Catherine McCormack as the lovely British lass, Mary). Uncle Charlie (Ron Livingston) stopped growing pot in the backyard 'cuz it got in the way of the tomatoes and up the road lives a nasty old Englishwoman, Maddy Bennett (Vanessa Redgrave). Maddy and is fond of shooting at Jimmy when he goes snooping about her grounds at night. They're about the only people that live in this particular scrap of MA, though there is a doctor who comes up from Boston. We're not sure about that "two years" timeframe mentioned above, either, since it's only mentioned once in the story and the flashback which recreates the accident has Jimmy looking about eight. Whatever it is, dad's a fast worker, which may be why James hates his stepmom.

We've always mandated that you shouldn't have to read the book to understand the film and, once we perused the notes that explained the genesis of the screenplay, we understood the big problem here, which we'll explain below.

Maddy describes herself as a "bitch," but she is within her rights when she demands that James repair damage he caused to part of her property. James doesn't manage to mention that Maddy was shooting at him at the time but, as he works at her house, a friendship is formed. Both characters suffer from loss; James's mother and Maddy's son Bobby, killed in the Vietnam war (though why all the pictures of Bobby as a child look as if they were shot in the 1930s is a mystery to us). James will learn Morse code for Maddy, which drops him into the replacement son category. Maddy, in turn, will try to help James with his grief, by teaching him about angels and giving him a book of "communications" received from Bobby, after his death. Dad forbids further contact with Maddy, but that doesn't stop James, especially after Maddy's heart attack. Why Maddy stays in her house, rather than go to the hospital for treatment, is not explained.

We can't even drop A Rumor of Angels into the category of "chick flicks we didn't understand" because its construction is incredibly awkward. Every scene plays like an abbreviation of a fully developed book chapter. Nothing flows evenly and director Peter O'Fallon lets enough visual continuity errors slip by in the early goings that the truly picky are going to have a field day. O'Fallon manages to put some lovely pictures up on the big screen, but his skill at telling a story -- he also contributed to the screenplay -- falls short.

This is the story we saw: Boy sees mom killed in an accident. Father is nowhere in sight. Two years later Father (returns) with a British wife, whom the son immediately dislikes. As a mom substitute, the boy forges a friendship with a local grandma type, whose son was "lost in the war." What time frame are we describing?

We're describing post W.W.II, not Vietnam, which is the alleged war in this story. Even stranger is the fact that the Source Material is a book written in the late 1800s, filled with comforting messages from beyond the grave, and you can see how three hands on the keyboard yield ninety minutes of gobbledygook. We're damned if we know exactly what story wants to be told in A Rumor of Angels, a great example of what not to do when adapting a book to the big screen but, since the source material consisted of snippets of sayings, we think the screenwriters could have made up anything they wanted to. That includes fully developed scenes instead of a grab bag of situations that barely hold the shape of a story.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Nine Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to A Rumor of Angels, he would have paid . . .

$1.00

Redgrave, as always, brings a great presence to the big screen. Unfortunately, neither she nor the other actors are given characters with enough background to make us care.

	Click to buy films by Peter O'Fallon
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