Snow Angels
Directed by David Gordon Green
While David Gordon Green once exemplified the essence of independent filmmaking with his 2000 debut George Washington, his new film Snow Angels shows he has since fallen victim to indie film conventions. George Washington was a true example of filmmaking that came from outside mainstream thinking and revenue streams. But in pursuing his career, Green corrupts his original poetic idiosyncrasies with the standard indie (or Sundancey) affectations.
Snow Angels’ story of waitress Annie (Kate Beckinsale) and her estranged, emotionally disturbed husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), whose confusion and violence rock their Canadian small town, is full of the same crap as Juno: False imputation of quirkiness to middle-class life (an inept marching band plays “Sledgehammer”; Annie works at a Chinese restaurant that has a non-Asian staff). Prejudiced skepticism about the church (Glenn’s maladjustment is rooted in religious fanaticism). And craven flattery of the youth market (a pair of idealized nerdy teens stumbling though a puberty subplot).
All this prefab pandering to the indie market’s secular, left-educated classes counteracts what made Green’s first film authentically regional, spiritual and a sign of hope. Snow Angels repeats the community facade vs. personal panic conceits that made Little Children and The Ice Storm obnoxious. Ironically, these films are all adaptations of yuppie fiction—itself a class-based distortion of suburban “truth.” The paradigm is the blatantly corporate, Oscar-winning American Beauty, which had the same youthful-innocence-contrasted-with-adult-corruption gimmick as Snow Angels. In this self-congratulatory depiction of modern life, indie filmmakers sentimentalize their own cynicism.
Through parallels of parents and children, marriage and dating, boys and men, girls and women, mothers and fathers, Green literalizes his once-poetic/abstract survey of how humans come of age. But here the analogies are superficial. Annie and Glenn’s childlike qualities are not reified through teens Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thrilby). The tragedy that occurs exceeds Green’s benevolent understanding and seems pseudo-tragic. While Gus Van Sant’s teen exploitation in Paranoid Park results from transferring his own neuroses to his objects of desire, Green has falsified and flattened the sense of yearning that made George Washington’s characters profound.
Arthur and Lila enjoy their discovery of sex (“When you say dumb things it makes me like you more.”) But Glenn can’t repair his marriage to Annie because he’s freaked by religion, and he’s still unstable following his hospital release after a suicide attempt (an Ordinary People shtick). The shot of Glenn undressed in bed with his dog and praying with his back to the camera matches the scene of Arthur in his bedroom sneaking a beer, but the connection is tangential and the common elements are cynical and imprecise. What Green tells us about Glenn and Arthur is not spiritual, just paranoid.
Access to indie stars inflates Green’s vision without enriching it. Beckinsale gets Annie’s bitchiness right, but she doesn’t convey the average-girl stress that Marisa Tomei brought to a similar role in Untamed Heart. Sam Rockwell’s neurotic specialty—by now it’s mastery—aims at Glenn’s pathos and never varies. If Rockwell had a single surprising moment—like Alessandro Nivola singing a hymn in Junebug that showed a new, mysterious side to his character—it might have redeemed this awkward mess with something genuine.
Though not so deplorable as Married Life, where another formerly promising director, Ira Sachs, betrays the promise of The Delta (his debut film), Snow Angels retains some of Green’s distinctively naive eccentricity. Arthur asks, “You notice no one ever brings out a camera on a sad day?” It’s an instant axiom showing the sensitivity that endears Lila to Arthur when she takes pictures of a funeral. That memorializing curiosity should define Green’s artistry, but in Snow Angels he loses grasp of how youth and age, sex and spirituality, family and community interrelate. This small town portrait isn’t eccentric; it’s just an indie-agnostic Peyton Place.
Directed by David Gordon Green
While David Gordon Green once exemplified the essence of independent filmmaking with his 2000 debut George Washington, his new film Snow Angels shows he has since fallen victim to indie film conventions. George Washington was a true example of filmmaking that came from outside mainstream thinking and revenue streams. But in pursuing his career, Green corrupts his original poetic idiosyncrasies with the standard indie (or Sundancey) affectations.
Snow Angels’ story of waitress Annie (Kate Beckinsale) and her estranged, emotionally disturbed husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), whose confusion and violence rock their Canadian small town, is full of the same crap as Juno: False imputation of quirkiness to middle-class life (an inept marching band plays “Sledgehammer”; Annie works at a Chinese restaurant that has a non-Asian staff). Prejudiced skepticism about the church (Glenn’s maladjustment is rooted in religious fanaticism). And craven flattery of the youth market (a pair of idealized nerdy teens stumbling though a puberty subplot).
All this prefab pandering to the indie market’s secular, left-educated classes counteracts what made Green’s first film authentically regional, spiritual and a sign of hope. Snow Angels repeats the community facade vs. personal panic conceits that made Little Children and The Ice Storm obnoxious. Ironically, these films are all adaptations of yuppie fiction—itself a class-based distortion of suburban “truth.” The paradigm is the blatantly corporate, Oscar-winning American Beauty, which had the same youthful-innocence-contrasted-with-adult-corruption gimmick as Snow Angels. In this self-congratulatory depiction of modern life, indie filmmakers sentimentalize their own cynicism.
Through parallels of parents and children, marriage and dating, boys and men, girls and women, mothers and fathers, Green literalizes his once-poetic/abstract survey of how humans come of age. But here the analogies are superficial. Annie and Glenn’s childlike qualities are not reified through teens Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thrilby). The tragedy that occurs exceeds Green’s benevolent understanding and seems pseudo-tragic. While Gus Van Sant’s teen exploitation in Paranoid Park results from transferring his own neuroses to his objects of desire, Green has falsified and flattened the sense of yearning that made George Washington’s characters profound.
Arthur and Lila enjoy their discovery of sex (“When you say dumb things it makes me like you more.”) But Glenn can’t repair his marriage to Annie because he’s freaked by religion, and he’s still unstable following his hospital release after a suicide attempt (an Ordinary People shtick). The shot of Glenn undressed in bed with his dog and praying with his back to the camera matches the scene of Arthur in his bedroom sneaking a beer, but the connection is tangential and the common elements are cynical and imprecise. What Green tells us about Glenn and Arthur is not spiritual, just paranoid.
Access to indie stars inflates Green’s vision without enriching it. Beckinsale gets Annie’s bitchiness right, but she doesn’t convey the average-girl stress that Marisa Tomei brought to a similar role in Untamed Heart. Sam Rockwell’s neurotic specialty—by now it’s mastery—aims at Glenn’s pathos and never varies. If Rockwell had a single surprising moment—like Alessandro Nivola singing a hymn in Junebug that showed a new, mysterious side to his character—it might have redeemed this awkward mess with something genuine.
Though not so deplorable as Married Life, where another formerly promising director, Ira Sachs, betrays the promise of The Delta (his debut film), Snow Angels retains some of Green’s distinctively naive eccentricity. Arthur asks, “You notice no one ever brings out a camera on a sad day?” It’s an instant axiom showing the sensitivity that endears Lila to Arthur when she takes pictures of a funeral. That memorializing curiosity should define Green’s artistry, but in Snow Angels he loses grasp of how youth and age, sex and spirituality, family and community interrelate. This small town portrait isn’t eccentric; it’s just an indie-agnostic Peyton Place.
