A Rumor of Angels

Twelve-year-old James, whose mother was killed in a car accident, spends the summer on the Maine coast. Nothing anyone tells him is any use: he is at odds with his father, distant from his stepmother, and talking to no one. What changes it is meeting Maude, the old woman the whole town keeps away from. Maude has lost someone too, and the relationship she has with death looks nothing like that of the adults around the boy. The screenplay starts from Grace Duffie Boylan's book about messages a mother believed were reaching her from a son killed at the front, which is why the film goes at the question of belief so directly. Peter O'Fallon does not try to prove anything and does not make a fool of anyone who disbelieves. Vanessa Redgrave plays Maude, with Ray Liotta and Catherine McCormack in the cast.