‘Snow Angels’ Takes Wrong Shape

By Duane Dudek, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Apr. 4–The films of David Gordon Green are eloquent slices of life that ring true because of their regional verisimilitude and because of the characters that feel sprung from it, rather than having been planted there.

So my disappointment with his new film, “Snow Angels,” is probably rooted in my deep affection for his earlier works — notably the adventure film “Undertow” and the love story “All the Real Girls.”

Perhaps because this is his first film not based on original material — it was adapted from the novel by Stewart O’Nan — or perhaps because it is the first step in his evolution toward more popular material, “Snow Angels” sounds like it is speaking in someone else’s voice and looks and feels like a departure from his outsider aesthetic.

Newcomers won’t notice, while purists will be further surprised to learn that Green has also directed the upcoming stoner comedy “Pineapple Express,” produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Seth Rogen.

To this point, Green has been a folklorist of sorts with roots in the South — he grew up in Texas and went to college in North Carolina — and his films have been starkly poetic works of social realism. They have been set and filmed in rarely seen places and reflected the lives of people who lived outside the mainstream.

“Snow Angels,” which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, is Green’s first film since leaving New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina, but anyone expecting that that experience would inform the film will be disappointed. Part thriller and part character study, it is set in a generic northeastern community, but was filmed in Canada. And perhaps because of this dislocation, it never develops a genuine sense of place and the characters never seem to live there.

Kate Beckinsale portrays the most beautiful woman in town, a single mother working as a waitress, who is separated from her born-again, possibly mentally ill and suicidal husband, played by Sam Rockwell. Meanwhile, she is having an affair with the loutish husband — played by Nicky Katt — of her co-worker and friend, played by Amy Sedaris.

A parallel story deals with a thoughtful youth, played by Michael Angarano, whose blossoming relationship with the new girl in school, played by Olivia Thirlby (the best friend in “Juno,” who plays down her dimpled cuteness by wearing ugly glasses) is contrasted with the troubled marriage of his parents, played by Griffin Dunne and Jeannetta Arnette.

As the engine that drives the story, Rockwell practically perspires needy desperation and a self-destructive quality that threatens to capsize all the character’s lives. And while the glamorous Beckinsale is miscast as a dowdy single mother, she is nonetheless persuasive as a diamond in the rough.

It is Green who doesn’t seem at home. He has worked with cinematographer Tim Orr since his 2000 debut “George Washington,” but this time their trademark pastoral rhythms seem patchwork and the characters transparent, as if half-glimpsed through a car window while passing through town.

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