David Gordon Green, the director and writer of Snow Angels, keeps coming closer and closer to perfection with each successive film. If you don't recognize his name, you soon will - he's the director of the next Judd Apatow movie The Pineapple Express, coming out in August.Hopefully, with The Pineapple Express, he will gain a wider audience for the intense personal dramas he is mastering. His titles include George Washington, All the Real Girls, and Undertow, and they are all worth watching for the way they capture the crumbling facade of lower-middle class life. That's not to say they are depressing or boring.
All the Real Girls is a romance film that contains some of the best getting-to-know-you dialogue I've ever heard between two characters. It made you care so much about the two people that were falling in love; you cared for them as individuals, not as plot devices manipulated by a violin chord on the soundtrack. And it has Paul Schneider in it - one of those under the radar actors, like Sam Rockwell here, who could do a two and a half hour documentary on techniques for mopping floors, and I would still go see it.
Undertow, Green's 2004 thriller, had one of the most intense and unnerving opening acts in recent memory - including one painful moment when a character steps on a nail and runs all the way home with it - and the board it is attached to - stuck in his foot. The film takes place in some kind of bizarre southern gothic universe, once removed from Night of the Hunter, where everyone sweats all the time, every car is two-toned with primer, all the wood is rotted through, and everything is covered in dirt. Electricity and telephones seem not to exist. The plot concerns a cache of gold coins stolen long ago and passed down through family lines. The film's tag line is Here me now brother, I was washed in the same blood as you. It haunts me to this day.
Now we have Snow Angels, his most ambitious movie yet. They're trying to sell this as a missing persons thriller, but that thread doesn't appear until halfway through the film. What we have here are multiple intertwining stories of life in a small New England town in the middle of a cold, snowy winter. The film opens with the high school marching band practicing the Peter Gabriel tune Sledgehammer when, all of a sudden, two gun shots ring out from the nearby woods. The film then flashes back several weeks, and leads up to that point.
The main character, Arthur (played by Michael Angarano), is your usual small town kid who sneaks beers from the fridge and has a crush on the nerdy girl at school, but doesn't know how to tell her. Arthur's father (played by Griffin Dunne) has just separated from his mother and moved out on his own. Arthur works as a dishwasher at the local Chinese restaurant where his former babysitter, Annie (played by Kate Beckinsale), also works. He used to have a crush on her. He once saw her naked. She still flirts with him and offers him rides home.
Annie represents the small town nightmare everyone from a small town hopes to escape becoming. She has a kid she doesn't want, she is separated from her formerly-alcoholic, now born-again Christian husband, Glenn (played by Sam Rockwell), and she is having an affair with another small town loser named Nate (played by Nicky Katt). Nate's wife works with her at the Chinese restaurant. Yes, it's that small of a town.
The film rotates through Arthur, Annie and Glenn as they collide and bounce off each other. Annie is coming to some sort of breaking point where she's either going to disintegrate or take off into orbit. She's too beautiful and smart to be trapped in the position she's in, nailed down in a white trash town, having an affair with some deadbeat, serving tables at an artificial Asian restaurant. There's self-loathing brimming at the tip of every cigarette she sucks down.
Glenn, on the other hand, is so self-deluding that he has convinced himself that if he pulls it together, quits the drink, and gets a respectable job, he may be able to get back with Annie and his daughter, and live happily ever after - just like the people in those K-Mart photos you have on your living room wall.
The only reprieve from this bleak house is through Arthur and his romance with the town's newest resident, Lila. The scenes between Angarano (as Arthur) and Olivia Thirlby (as Lila) are so good, they made me yearn for the days back in the Indiana winter of my youth where I had similarly ridiculous and seemingly inconsequential all-night conversations with that significant other-wannabe who I, in most cases, never got to sneak in through my bedroom window. Eh, my parents would've caught me anyway.
My description of this film may make it seem like your everyday small town drama, but it is far more than that. As with every good film, it's the details and the performances that carry it to the next level, and as I have said already, David Gordon Green is a master at capturing small town life. And the performances here are astounding. Kate Beckinsale doesn't need to do anymore vampire movies, and I hope she doesn't do any stupid romantic comedies either. And Angarano and Thirlby - well, it's tough for writers to get teenagers to sound like teenagers, but there's always hope. These two are just charming.
And as for Sam Rockwell, only two words will do - Holy Shit! This guy runs the spectrum of emotions from suicidal to vindictive to hopeless to overwhelmingly optimistic. He hurts himself, he holds it in, he cares so very much about his daughter. Sometimes it seems a ploy - that he only cares about himself - but with the flip of a switch, he's The World's Greatest Dad.
It's too bad all these terrible things happen to these nice, screwed up people. It's heartbreaking.
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