March 16, 2008
Snow Angels
Green Grows Up
Like the students in the marching band that opens the film, the characters in Snow Angels, are all linked whether they like it or not. Their fates are intertwined with those of the people around them and one mistake by anyone in the procession will cause the whole thing to come crumbling down. Arthur is a member of both the marching band and the small loosely related group of people the film is based around. His parents, his former babysitter, Annie, and her estranged husband, Glenn, make up the other main components in the group. As the story unfolds, relationships fall apart, people die, and people fall in love. In the middle of all this is Arthur, the high school student.
The film is David Gordon Green's fourth feature film. In 2000 he burst onto the film scene with the remarkable George Washington, a beautifully photographed film that drew heavily upon Killer of Sheep and the works of Terrence Malick. In 2003, Green released All the Real Girls. The film starred a then relatively unknown Zooey Deschanel in a touching but ultimately uneven love story. Undertow, starring Jamie Bell, released the following year, is a solid but unspectacular thriller that's best described as a gothic Night of the Hunter by way of 1970s American cinema.
In terms of craftsmanship, Snow Angels is wonderful. Tim Orr, Green's usual cinematographer, once again produces a predictably gorgeous film. The sleepy snow covered town's empty playgrounds and treacherous backwoods are infused with a dreary beauty befitting the mood of the story being told. Likewise, the scenes leading up to the tragedy that shatters the lives of the characters involved are expertly edited and create more tension and generate more grief than the moment is probably actually worth.
Just as you can be sure that you're going be presented with an exceedingly pleasurable aesthetic experience, you can also count on an extreme emotional earnestness in Green's work. Having largely dealt with young adults or children, this has been fine. The emotions of the children in George Washington are explored without a hint of cynicism or the inevitable downplaying of a child's feelings. Instead, the sincere nature with which Green and his characters live and grow is what lends his films the innocence and air of profundity that his critical admirers are so fond of.
In Snow Angels, Arthur's budding romance with his classmate, Lila, works for the same reason the romance in All the Real Girls works. The two speak to each other and act towards one another in a way that is more line with actual reality than the "reality" that is so popular in films, the same reality in which protagonists always have better aim than the bad guys and people can drive cars while keeping their eyes on the road. Arthur and Lila say and do the sorts of silly things that couples usually only do when alone, giving the beginnings of their romance an honesty and naiveté that is often missing in film dealing with people their age.
Unfortunately, the rest of the characters in Snow Angels are adults and unsympathetic ones at that. To be fair, Green intended for them to be that way but I'm not sure if he intended for their personalities to be as grating as they are. The problem is that Green's earnestness doesn't work well with his adult characters. We expect them to know better than their less mature counterparts but all they do is whine, argue, and feel sorry for themselves. Obviously, they go through some tough times but the characters all come off as completely unaware of anything beyond themselves. Watching a child mope about how hard their life is can be endearing, watching self-centered adults do it is an exercise in patience.
The marching band metaphor that Green opens the film with turns out to have been a weak one in hindsight. The cast of characters is small and the storytelling so myopic that the tragedy's reverberations throughout the small town go unexplored. In Twin Peaks, another work about a small town, we really see how major events can disrupt the fabric of a small town. Unfortunately, Snow Angels is just as obsessed with its characters as they are with themselves and it suffocates the film. While not a horrible addition to Green's filmography, it seems to promise much more than it offers just as Green's career has since George Washington.
