Review: Snow Angels (2008) *** 1/2
Young love: Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby in Snow Angels
From the beginning, the new drama Snow Angels would like you to consider the interconnectedness of people as each name in the opening credits is drawn in part from the letters of the one before it.
The theme continues through the first scene which follows a shambling high school marching band rehearsing on a winter morning as their bandleader admonishes them through a megaphone. “Every person matters,” he says. “Every step leads to the next.” As if on cue, the scene is suddenly interrupted by two distant gunshots.
What follows is a flashback that traces a series of parallel, overlapping relationships between people at various stages, charting different trajectories leading up to the gunfire. Many of the connections are literal as the people are linked to one another in various ways, but they’re also joined peripherally as actions and reactions have shockwaves that ripple out with unintended and unforeseen consequences for relative strangers who are otherwise united only by the fact that they live in the same small Pennsylvania community.
Though his story doesn’t necessarily carry more weight than any of the others, young Arthur is the pivot point for all of the different threads. He’s a scruffy, awkward high school kid we first meet as a trombone player in the marching band. He’s friends with nerdy Lila, but seems clueless about the budding crush she has on him.
After school, Arthur washes dishes at a local Chinese restaurant where he works alongside Annie. She’s Arthur’s former babysitter and a single mother who supports her 3-year-old daughter by waiting tables. Her ex-husband is a recovering alcoholic who is trying to get his feet back on the ground and find his way back into Annie’s life.
Rounding things out are Arthur’s parents. They’re a middle-aged couple and, no longer sure what to do with each other now that the fire in their relationship is gone and their son is nearly grown, they’ve decided to separate. Arthur’s mother seems shell shocked as his father prepares to move out of the house.
Because of how the movie begins, it’s safe to assume that someone’s story is going to end badly and there’s a palpable sense of dread that slowly builds as Snow Angels progresses. Perhaps because of the snowy small-town setting, I was put in the mind of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, though instead of beginning with a bus accident and then tracing the consequences, Snow Angels is more like a slow motion train wreck. You can see it coming, but no one seems to be able to stop it as one thing leads to another. When tragedy finally strikes, it has a galvanizing effect on each character. Things are permanently changed with some people’s lives destroyed and others jarred into altering course.
Such drama relies in large measure on the performances of the actors and the cast of Snow Angels delivers. As Arthur, Michael Angarano (Lords of Dogtown) perfectly captures the unease of a high school kid still finding his sea legs in life. Bespectacled Olivia Thirlby (Juno) is adorable as Arthur’s potential sweetheart, the bookish Lila, and she nails the frustration tinged bemusement of a young girl who is maturing emotionally a bit faster than the boy who has caught her fancy. The chemistry between the two of them is terrific.
As Annie, luminously movie-star-beautiful Kate Beckinsale (The Last Days of Disco) should be out of place in this small town of ordinary people whose dreams never managed to carry them very far from the place they were born, but she pulls it off. She’s excellent and believable as the former high school beauty who was acted upon by life rather than the other way around.
Sam Rockwell (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) is Glenn, Annie’s high school sweetheart and ex-husband. When we meet him as an adult, he’s earnest but a bit of a loser. He’s back living at home with his parents and, perhaps instilled with religion at AA meetings, he clings to God with the dubious conviction of a salesman. Rockwell has a knack for making the dialogue seem almost improvisational and it’s not hard to see how the immaturity that is such a liability for Glenn as an adult was probably fun and charming to Annie when they were in school. Unfortunately for Annie, by the time she realized Glenn was never going to grow up, she was probably already pregnant.
Snow Angels excels in the small moments it creates as it captures naturalistic snatches of human experience and strings them together like little beads of reality, from Glenn interacting with his daughter (their pre-meal prayer at the mall food court is classic) to the escalating flirtations between Arthur and Lila. Unfortunately, the reality of the individual incidents and the naturalism of the performances don’t quite jibe with the artificial construct of the cyclical and overlapping stories. Working from Stewart O’Nan’s novel, writer/director David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls) seems to be aiming at something larger and more universal, but the strength of his direction lies in the specific details. A simplified narrative charting only the story of Arthur/Olivia and that of Arthur’s parents would not have been as far reaching, but would have made for a stronger film and one with more impact.
On the other hand, the multiple story threads that follow different trajectories allow for wrenching drama while ensuring that it never becomes overwhelming. Tragic endings for certain characters are new beginnings for others and hope is never quite lost. In this way, the film largely succeeds on its own terms and while its effect is diffused at times, it always holds your interest and ultimately leaves you moved. It’s this emotional component combined with some terrific performances that makes Snow Angels a drama well worth seeing even if it isn’t quite perfect.
Snow Angels. USA. 2007 (released 2008). Written and directed by David Gordon Green from a novel by Stewart O’Nan. Cinematography by Tim Orr. Music score composed by Jeff McIlwain and David Wingo. Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano, Olivia Thirlby, Jeanetta Arnette, Griffin Dunne, Nicky Katt and Amy Sedaris. 1 hour 46 minutes. MPAA rated R for language, some violent content, brief sexuality and drug use. 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Filed under: Reviews
Tags: Amy Sedaris, David Gordon Green, David Wingo, Griffin Dunne, Jeanetta Arnette, Jeff McIlwain, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Angarano, Nicky Katt, Olivia Thirlby, Sam Rockwell, Snow Angels, Stewart O'Nan, Tim Orr
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Hmm, you’re not giving a lot of glowing recommendations these days. Time of the year, of course. I had to tiptoe through this but it was just enough for me to put it on my “Yeah, I probably should” list. I always like Kate Beckinsale.
That’s funny because I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of crap.
Married Life and Snow Angels are both qualified positives, though not raves.
Band’s Visit and 4 Weeks (if I’d seen it in 08 and written a full review) would’ve been the only full on raves so far this year, I think.
Still, if you like Kate I think you’ll like Snow Angels. Go for Kate, but stay for Olivia. Yeah, I have a thing for nerdy girls.
Hmm, nerdy girls. That could be an EW list as well, or even better, an original LiC list…
I’ll let Band’s Visit fall back into 2007 and say City of Men and The Counterfeiters are my ‘08 tops thus far. Of course, it’s only been a month since the year “really” started (post-Oscar) anyway.
The Nerdy Girl list is quite possibly a fabulous idea. I’ll think on it and start complining. If I can come up with enough good ones, a list there shall be…credited to you of course. If you think of any of your own, email me.
If you start a nerdy girl list, don’t forget Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Full disclosure Alison: I was thinking of nerdy girls I want to sleep with so that narrows the field…but yeah, Dawn from Dollhouse probably sneaks in.
I fear I’ve admitted too much. :)
Snow Angels would be on my list. It is. Even more now after your review Craig, very, very cool.
I am no huge fan of Kate, I need her to be in a film that I can actually say “wow, this woman can actually act”. I would be seeing it mostly for Olivia and Rockwell. Mostly Olivia. Okay, seriously though, I would be seeing this only for Olivia.
*I wonder if I made my point clear….*
The storyline sounds good though too…I love films with parallel stories, and then they interconnect.
A simple “I’m in for Snow Angels” would have sufficed I guess.
Funny thing is Nick, Olivia’s character in Juno annoyed me…but she’s made up for it 257% with Snow Angels.
I think I might be stalking her now.
Darn it, Craig, you and your LA-ness keeps beating me to the punch on these films.
San Francisco Bay Area–represent!
(Actually, I see this is playing at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, but I think I’ll wait for it to arrive in Marin County.)
It’s David Gordon Green, so I’ve tried to keep myself as much in the dark as possible, despite seeing the trailer for this before Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day–though, thankfully, the trailer’s ambiguity and vagueness didn’t really… reveal all that much.
Oh, yeah, I’m in for Snow Angels.
New York has the jump on the both of us Alexander. I caught it last weekend, but NY saw it the weekend before. Punks.
Anyway, looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Looking around, the general reception is more modest than my own.
Well, David Gordon Green is somewhat divisive in the (cliche alert) “critical community,” but thus far I’ve rolled with what he’s been creating. Definitely one of my favorite younger filmmakers.
Well, I saw it and for the most part really liked it. It’s more plotty than any of David Gordon Green’s previous films, and you get the sense that it’s almost like a cinematic workout for him to keep the parallel stories going (though, honestly, George Washington wasn’t entirely dissimilar, but less definitively structured, almost an ambling film rather than this, which plays a bit like a thriller).
The film also shares some similarities with Little Children, I thought, with men continually chasing pretty women, and women wanting a better life for themselves, their children and their often failing men. That and the quotidian, day-to-day observations the film makes.
I do think that, despite the screentime quotient, which I would assume makes the Annie-Glenn story the big one, somehow the achingly sweet, beautifully simple story of Arthur and Lila captured me with greater alacrity.
ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS SPOILING–FOR THOSE WHO HAVE YET TO SEE IT, READ NO MORE
One thing, though: Sam Rockwell worries the hell out of me. For six months now I’ve had that image of him from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford–where he so pathetically, unceremoniously kills himself–that seeing him do another suicide, again with such intensity and empathetic poignancy, was almost too much. This guy is going to become a regular feature in my nightmares.
Wow, I hadn’t even thought of that Rockwell thing…
It doesn’t help that he plays those kinds of characters so well.
What’d you think of Beckinsale? Several reviewers thought she was not great and out of place. I thought she worked.
I thought she worked, too. Again, like Little Children, with Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly, she initially seems too beautiful for the environment around her but I think there are beautiful women in all areas of society. Beckinsale seemed even more “toned down,” and it was a good move on the part of the filmmakers. Not to say she still wasn’t beautiful, she was, but they made her look more “ordinary” than she is.
One thing I wanted to bring up in my original post and didn’t. I thought the film, as good as it remained, kind of became “slack” entering the third act. I’m not sure what most critics think yet, as I haven’t begun reading most reviews (only yours). But I do think it could have been a little tighter going into the home stretch. As it was, it kind of limped to the finish line after being so taut for so long. Even for a few scenes after the big incident with Beckinsale’s child, it still holds firm but somewhere around the time when we have the ninth or tenth scene of Rockwell being shown to having a kind of meltdown, it sort of lost its way a bit.
Still an overall strong film. Just a little uneven. I don’t mind “unevenness” from David Gordon Green usually but in this case it seemed to go against the lack of wasted motion that he had seemed to set up with so many dynamic scenes directly following others.
Yeah overall as you can see I liked it, though it wasn’t flawless. I found it a little scattered and the individual stories more interesting by themselves than the way they added up.