B-
David Gordon Green’s penchant for elliptical storytelling and visual lyricism doesn’t seem entirely at home with the harsh, bleak material provided by Stewart O’Nan’s novel about family troubles and young love in a wintry northern town. But though it may not play to his natural strengths, “Snow Angels” has the benefit—as his last film, “Undertow,” also did—of imposing a stronger-than-usual narrative thrust on his tendency to digress into amorphous and lackadaisical rambling.
The ironically-titled film focuses on characters who are haunted by a host of personal demons, and ultimately it’s a story of grief and pain that reveals the locale to be as far from a paradise as one could imagine. Structurally it’s a collage of interrelated stories that proceed in a circular fashion, beginning with a high school band practice interrupted by a couple of distant gunshots, then segueing into a narrative that precedes the event before reaching its resolution by returning to the starting-point.
The two major plot threads focus on Annie Marchand (Kate Beckinsale), a waitress at a Chinese restaurant, and Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano), a sensitive high school kid who’s a busboy at the same place and still nurses a crush on Annie from the days when she baby-sat him. Annie dotes on her young daughter Tara (Grace Hudson) while trying to take care of her ill mother and maintain reasonably good but reserved relations with her ex-husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), a troubled soul who’s “found Jesus” after a stint in a mental institution following a failed suicide attempt. She’s also having an affair with Nate Petite (Nicky Katt), the wayward husband of her best friend, and fellow waitress, Barb (Amy Sedaris). Arthur, meanwhile, is coping with the separation of his parents Don and Louise (Griffin Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette)) while gingerly striking up a romance with geeky classmate Lila (Olivia Thirlby), the yearbook photographer.
Green’s adaptation is adept at juggling the relationships that dominate here—the sweet experimentation of Arthur and Lila, the off-again, on-again one between his parents, the bruising, acidic tussle between Annie and Glenn, and the obviously strained one between Nate and Barb—and catching the very different tones of each while for the most part tempering his habit of transforming a naturalistic style into a sort of woozy romanticism. Here the treatment is more direct and gritty, though there are moments (such as a weird non-dance sequence with Glenn in a bar) that lapse into the familiar exaggerations. He’s aided by solid work from production designer Richard Wright, who nails the seedy quality of lower class life, and cinematographer Tim Orr, who uses the Nova Scotia locations expertly to create a chilly, forbidding feel.
And the cast is an excellent one. Rockwell catches the mood shifts of the tortured, violence-prone husband fearlessly, and Beckinsale matches him. The supporting turns by Katt, the against-type Sedaris, and Dunne are excellent. Young Angarano delivers another fine turn to add to a growing resume, conveying both the amazed joy of first love and the fragility of a boy beset by sad twists of fate, and Thirlby matches up with him nicely as a girl who’s more knowing than she initially appears. Tom Noonan contributes a delightful cameo as the school’s peevish band director.
Still, in the end “Snow Angels” doesn’t entirely work. It’s not merely that it’s so grim and uncompromising that most viewers will find it nearly unendurable. The problem is that while it has powerful individual moments, it doesn’t quite cohere, sometimes coming across as dilatory and self-indulgent; and the construction, particularly in terms of the book-ending elements, has a contrived literary feel, as do several of the intervening episodes (like a final kitchen confrontation between Annie and Glenn). And Green’s inclination to lyricism sometimes seems at odds with the gruesome subjects he’s addressing. In comparison to another study of grief in a wintry northern climate, Atom Egoyan’s masterful “The Sweet Hereafter,” for example, his film feels studied and uneven.
In isolation, though, “Snow Angels” is worth seeing despite its flaws and the deep depression it’s likely to leave you with. And together with “Undertow,” it suggests that Green has left behind the airily rootless quality of his early work and is ready to provide it with some dramatic backbone.