Frigid Americans Try To Keep Warm
"It's so important that you feel through this," Louise Parkinson (Jeannetta Arnette) tells her son, Arthur (Michael Angarano), during the heartbreaking denouement of David Gordon Green's new film "Snow Angels." Taking place in a northern American small town, smack-dab in the middle of Russell Banks country, the plaid-clad, winter-set tragedy of "Snow Angels" superficially recalls Paul Schrader's "Affliction" and Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter."
But Mr. Green and his cast have blessed their adaptation of Stewart O'Nan's Banksian first novel with the same limpid sensitivity that characterizes the director's previous films. "Snow Angels" is a change of scenery for the Texas-raised filmmaker, who has chronicled Southern-fried angst and irony-free epiphany in such films as "George Washington," "All the Real Girls," and "Undertow." Nevertheless, "Snow Angels" confidently navigates the debris of wasted lives and enveloping shadows of self-hatred with feeling, intelligence, and an unusual ease considering the dire events depicted.
Annie (Kate Beckinsale) and Glenn Marchand (Sam Rockwell) are former high school sweethearts whose marriage has been destroyed by Glenn's insecurity and alcoholism. Annie's co-worker, Barb (Amy Sedaris), is married to Nate (Nicky Katt), a narcissistic nurse who has, unbeknownst to Barb, caught Annie's fancy. Louise and husband Don's (Griffin Dunne) multi-decade union has produced both teenage Arthur and enough dissatisfaction and unease that their household is disintegrating. Arthur, increasingly enamored of his gorgeous nerd-goddess classmate, Lila ("Juno" best friend Olivia Thirlby), appears to be the sole remaining custodian of romance left in his family — possibly in the entire town.
Mr. Green has proved himself in the past to be particularly adept at portraying the giddy, awkward, and relentless forward motion of first love. The growth of Arthur and Lila's burgeoning emotional and physical relationship is measured out in such unabashedly breathless doses that it almost seems like a wish-fulfillment vision of teenage lust and love bordering on Aristotelian perfection. Annie and Glenn, however, are another story. In happier times, Glenn "had this way of making me feel like everything was going to work out in the end," Annie confides to a friend. Now the only sensation Glenn seems able to evoke in Annie or anyone around him is pity. "We had the locks changed," Annie tells her confused, estranged husband when he comes by to take their young daughter on an outing, "so your key probably won't work." Passive-aggressive, evasive, selfish, and spoiled, the woman who in her youth defined herself by her relationship with Glenn has grown enough to know that the only place she definitely doesn't belong is with her husband.
Whether via religion, pointless devotion to the past, self-deception, alcohol, drugs, sex, sarcasm, or art, everyone in "Snow Angels" appears to be keeping some defining inner truth about themselves from everyone else. And yet for a movie predominantly populated by cads, scolds, suckers, emotional cripples, and human time-bombs, Mr. Green scrupulously avoids the safety of judgment and detachment or the high-concept cop-out of magic realism and overt symbolism. As melodramatic as things get in "Snow Angels," there is never any sense of overwrought emotional spectacle.
Working as always with the enormously talented cinematographer Tim Orr, Mr. Green discreetly fills the wide-screen frames of "Snow Angels" with intersecting, shallow-focus surfaces and reflections. The camera pans and tilts away from the action as much as it targets moments, effectively poking holes of calm and grace in what would otherwise be an irredeemably dark, frozen, and strangled snowglobe world.
Mr. Rockwell has, in a relatively short period, become a screen actor of reliably courageous facility. Playing a potentially abusive loser desperately trying to keep himself morally afloat via evangelical Christian devotion, Mr. Rockwell finds both the hardened core and bottomless need at the center of an unraveling man. Ms. Beckinsale, who has opted of late for more glamorous roles, brings Annie to a remarkably complete and satisfyingly unflattering dramatic life, bound by her character's flaws and transgressions.
"Snow Angels" is ultimately defined by death. It offers little in the way of conventional literal moralizing or tangible comfort to assuage the terrible damage that several of the film's characters wreak and sustain by the end. And yet it is a movie full to bursting with hope for a warmer season and a better chance at happiness for those who can endure the winter chill and feel through life's catastrophes.
