Kate Beckinsale heats up 'Snow Angels'

Director's flawed story-telling skills leave film flailing

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

April 11, 2008

(C+) Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. She brings relentless energy and vitality to Annie, the estranged wife of a boozing, born-again screw-up, Glenn (Sam Rockwell), and the driven mother of their young daughter. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is.

The artful writer-director, David Gordon Green, may feel he invests his characters with poignancy by depicting them as people with scant inner resources, flailing their way toward uncertain destinies. Instead he robs them of any interest beyond what the actors bring to them. In Beckinsale's case that's quite a lot.

The screenplay is taken from Stewart O'Nan's more expansive and delicate novel (also called Snow Angels), set in western Pennsylvania in 1974. But apart from the Pennsylvania license plates, Green's film unfolds in a hazy setting and time-frame: Smalltown, U.S.A., in the recent past. (It was actually shot in Canada.)

The wintry vistas are at first bleakly beautiful, then numbing; they externalize the blank imagination and feeble initiative of the characters. All but the youngest, Arthur (Michael Angarano) who's still in high school, are stuck or adrift. Even with the help of scripture, Glenn can't let go of Annie, and Annie can't stake out a new life, unless you count her opportunistic affair with Nate (Nicky Katt), the comically preening male-nurse husband of her best friend, Beth (Amy Sedaris).

Annie, Beth and Arthur work at the local Chinese restaurant (the women wait tables, the boy buses them) and, in the film's best scenes, the actors bring their interplay the savvy-tender comedy-drama of Waitress or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Annie flirts with Arthur sweetly, nudging him to view himself as a rising young man.

Green wants us to see Annie partly through Arthur's awestruck eyes: She was once his babysitter. But Annie is just as much a dynamo when Arthur isn't around. It's as if Green responded so strongly to Beckinsale's creativity that he not only let her run away with the movie but cleared everyone else off the track.

Green feebly tries to balance her vigor with Arthur's poignancy, as the boy tentatively embarks on a romance with a vibrant photographer his own age (Olivia Thirlby). The kid has grown wary of intimacy because of the botched couples around him, including his parents ( Griffin Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette), who separate at the movie's start; unlike any of the adults, when the teenagers make love, they're tender, innocent and playful.

But this part of Snow Angels proves disappointingly banal as well as woefully youth-centric. Arthur's parents' breakup becomes a dramatic bust; his dad grows tired of cooking hot dogs in a toaster and longs for the solidity of his old life. It's too droopy even for a sitcom. Call it sitdram.

Still, even when Green's script says that adults are irrevocably selfish, inertia-ridden or screwed up (and that kids have their whole lives ahead of them), his unpredictable staging and cutting freshen up the action. He can be a terrific observational filmmaker, able to keep the surface action brisk and full of possibilities. He follows arcs of emotion as they leap from character to character, even in group scenes like a high school band practice; there's nothing rote about the way he cuts from devastating statements or actions to reactions.

But he falters as a storyteller. The narrative should be about Arthur weighing Annie's dilemmas against his own knowledge and feelings. What's near-great about the novel is the indirect way it presents his unsentimental education, so when Arthur says, "I could not see how I would ever come to hate the people I loved" yet "at the same time I could do nothing to stop it," you know exactly what he means.

Because of Beckinsale, the movie is mostly about how a live-wire can produce more energy than a small town can contain. She brings her own logic to her sections of the movie, but it's the logic of a fiery angel, not a snow angel.

>>>Snow Angels (Warner Independent) Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano. Directed by David Gordon Green. Rated R for language, brief sexuality, some violent content and drug use. Time 106 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com