There’s one great subplot running through David Gordon Green’s otherwise miserable drama Snow Angels, and not surprisingly it’s the only one that exhibits any sort of optimism or humanity. Shy teen Arthur (Michael Angarano) plays trombone (badly) in the school band, has a jerk of a best friend and is dealing with his parents splitting up. But he’s also just entering into a sweet, halting romance with fellow shy teen Lila (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby), the new girl in school. Their relationship is sometimes awkward but never sad, full of the small joys of discovering love for the first time and finding genuine emotional support in times of trouble.
Too bad it’s less than a third of the movie’s plot, which mostly focuses on Arthur’s former babysitter, struggling single mother Annie (Kate Beckinsale), who’s stuck with a crappy job, a nagging mother, a whiny four-year-old daughter and a seriously deranged soon-to-be-ex-husband. Glenn (Sam Rockwell) is an intermittently employed alcoholic, a born-again Christian and an occasionally violent stalker. The movie starts with two gunshots ringing out in the distance during one of Arthur’s school-band rehearsals. Want to guess where they came from?
Writer-director Green (working from a novel by Stewart O’Nan) then flashes back to a few weeks earlier to slowly tease out the unpleasant events that lead up to those shots. What looks at first to be a standard-issue indie relationship drama ratchets up the misery until it appears to climax with a horrible tragedy at the film’s midpoint. But things just get worse and worse from there, and by that time the affecting, human moments between Arthur and Lila and even occasionally between Annie and Glenn have been overshadowed by increasingly strained histrionics, and Beckinsale and Rockwell doing a whole lot of acting.
It’s not good acting, per se, although the characters and situations they’re saddled with become so melodramatic by the end that the actors ought to be admired simply for not screaming to the heavens whenever some new tragedy, major or minor, arises (they can’t resist the urge to do so occasionally, though). Green, known for artful evocations of small-town life, once again works with cinematographer Tim Orr to make the simple locales of this unnamed, probably Midwestern town look beautiful and even haunting, although his precious compositions only highlight the artificiality of the story and characters. The ever-present snow and cold, meant presumably as a metaphor for the oppressive atmosphere in which these people are always about to suffocate, merely add to the stifling nature of the film’s focus on the dour and the dismal.
Life is hard and often full of tragedy, sure, and movies can show that in a way that finds both beauty and emotional power in everyday horrors. But Snow Angels, especially in its overwrought second half, merely wallows in unearned sadness; all of its artful lens flares can’t substitute for believable characters whose lives are worth caring about, and by the time the absurdly operatic ending rolls around, you’re as ready as the characters are for it all to be over.
Snow Angels
**
Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano, Olivia Thirlby
Directed by David Gordon Green
Rated R