Snow Angels

This film was released in America 6 months ago and I really liked the sound of it, in all the time that has past this has got no closer to getting a UK release so I took the opportunity to catch this online as I may not have been able to do so otherwise. The story begins with a band practice at an American high school which is interrupted by two gunshots in the background, we then cut to weeks earlier. The film follows an estranged couple (Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale) who are struggling to come to terms with how to raise their child (Kate's having an affair, Rockwell's trying to get over a failed suicide) and a boy who Kate works with and his family/school issues.

The first big problem with this film is that it has no idea what story it's trying to tell. Despite being adapted from a novel, the storyline of the lad and his seperating parents coupled with his relationship with the new girl in school (Olivia Thirlby, much better than the role demands) feels tired and tacked on - the meat and bones of the film is the Rockwell/Beckinsale relationship. The film has enough drama to sustain about an hour of its runtime and it all comes from the one part, it's incredibly unbalanced.

The second problem is that eventually, after we've fully got to know the characters and the situations they find themselves in the script becomes increasingly banal, predictable and condescending. When not realising that two people shouting at each other is not inherently dramatic and laying it on with a trowel in the "big, emotional" scenes the script resorts to characters spelling out everything they're going through verbally, just in case you missed it amongst the shouting. It becomes horrendously melodramatic and that coupled with the characters and how they've been presented makes it almost impossible to care about what happens to them.

The cast is adequate but are mishandled. Beckinsale is fine but they miss no opportunity to "give her a scene" and sometimes, especially with material like this, less is more. Rockwell is surprisingly one-note for most of his performance and he has an inability to portray the humiliation of his character's being continually rebuffed by Beckinsale (something a much more inexperienced actor like Mark Webber did so wonderfully in The Hottest State) which makes his behaviour difficult to accept and watching it a very austere experience. Thirlby does wonders with what she's given, but the storyline is reduced to male-fantasy about this pretty, interesting girl throwing herself at this bland, 2D kid, she's utterly wasted. Griffin Dunne as the Dad is asked to do nothing and Nicky Katt as Beckinsale's lover just plays up to every cliche in the book to try to help us feel sympathy for Rockwell. Instead we feel the intentions of the screenwriter, they're incredibly transparent and makes you very aware you're a/ watching a film and b/ being manipulated, the result of which is the complete failure of the intent because you're too busy being poked by the filmmakers to naturally care about the story.

So an incredibly disappointing film. It starts well then slowly, but surely erodes your interest away until you're dying for it to end. We know about the two shots, it becomes painfully obvious what's going to happen to cause those, we keep being shown the boy and his "issues" and they are a continual breaking up of the one "interesting" part of the narrative, which sadly becomes so over the top and mishandled as they are both pushed to unpalatably bombastic levels by writer/director David Gordon Green. It's one of those American indie films that fails to make much of an impression on the box office, which would normally make you assume it was an injustice. At a $400,000 take it seems this film found the audience it deserved and I can see now why there's seemingly no interest in showing it here. There shouldn't be any.