'Snow Angels' good but not perfect
David Gordon Green built some great expectations with his acclaimed debut, "George Washington," but with his subsequent films - "All the Real Girls" and "Undertow" - he hasn't really delivered.
With "Snow Angels," though, the young North Carolinian finally delivers on some of that early promise.
While far from perfect, the Altman-like ensemble piece about love and tragedy in a perpetually gray western Pennsylvania town is easily his most assessable movie to date. But it's also his most conventional, as he fights to find the right balance between art and commerce.
You can sense that struggle throughout a film that's gripping and fresh one minute, bland and predictable the next. What saves him is the movie's one constant: his outstanding cast.
Other than Kate Beckinsale, they are largely unknown and nondescript actors, just like the characters they play. For most filmmakers that would be a liability, but for Green, a stickler for realism, it's an opportunity.
He gets the most out of each, particularly Beckinsale, an actress who's built a career on looks more than talent. Here, though, she astounds with the depth of emotion wrung from playing a single mother with a dead-end job and a deadbeat ex-husband (a wrenching Sam Rockwell) under the delusion he's going to win her back now that he's found God.
At first Beckinsale seems a little too glam, but she is so persuasive that you accept her as a homecoming queen whose life has spiraled downward from a series of bad choices. She's carrying on a clandestine affair with the husband (Nicky Katt) of her best friend and fellow waitress (Amy Sedaris).
It's a purely-for-lust dalliance that will trigger a grim chain of events touching everyone in her immediate circle, including her 4-year-old daughter, Tara (Grace Hudson).
In that respect, "Snow Angels" has the feel of Altman's "Short Cuts" and Paul Haggis' Oscar-winning "Crash."
Like the latter, "Snow Angels" emits an odor of contrivance as a series of uncanny coincidences unfold, bringing some characters closer together while tearing others irreparably apart.
It all begins, appropriately enough, on a wintry plain where the high school band director (Tom Noonan) is admonishing his young musicians for their lackadaisical performance of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (apt, considering how often it feels like Green is wielding one) when two shots ring out in the distance.
Flashback "a few weeks earlier" and the film recounts what led up to the shooting while keeping you guessing about who might be involved, as well as the location.
Your instinct in this age of Columbine is that it's inside the high school, but then you remember "Snow Angels" is based on a novel by Steward O'Nan set in 1974, a time when school shootings were still out of the realm of possibility.
Domestic disputes, however, were very much in vogue, and "Snow Angels" offers up a plethora of unhappy couples, from Rockwell's and Beckinsale's former high school sweethearts, to Katt's and Sedaris' Nate and Barb, to Griffin Dunne's and Jeannetta Arnnette's recently separated Don and Louise.
In adapting O'Nan's novel, Green retains much of the flavor and sensibilities of the 1970s, but relocates the principals to today, an alteration that succeeds simply because the inhabitants of this starkly beautiful backwater (shot nicely by Green regular Tim Orr) remain tragically locked in a time warp of sexual and religious mores.
Yet the characters always seem vital and current, especially two young would-be lovers played with beauty and grace by Michael Angarano ("Sky High") and Olivia Thirlby, the notorious scene-stealer who played Ellen Page's best friend in "Juno." Their sweet, refreshingly unaffected courtship is the one glimmer of hope in this decidedly downbeat slog and you feel a refreshing jolt of life every time they pop onto the screen. You also admire the way Angarano breezes so effortlessly through the movie as the touchstone for all the characters.
The only problem is believing that everyone in his life would be dealing with a major romantic crisis at the exact same time he's discovering first love.
It's just one of many manipulations Green employs to hold up his flimsy house of cards. It might have cost him, too, if not for the strong sense of place he instills.
Ditto for his knack of leavening the decidedly somber mood with dry humor and a ray of hope.
To extract optimism from the depths of utter despair is truly a gift on the part of a filmmaker finally beginning to realize his promise, even if he remains a little rough around the edges.
Grade: C+
Rated R. "Snow Angels" contains language, some violent content, brief sexuality and drug use.