Sometimes good work writes out a bad check. Sometimes superior production values makes for an inferior emotional experience. Sometimes heartbreak falls short as a spectator sport. Sometimes quality just isn't enough.
That's the case from this vantage point with writer-director David Gordon Green's Snow Angels, an otherwise commendable drama that is so harsh and bleak and uncompromising, so severely somber and decidedly downbeat, that there's little breathing room left for any kind of actual pleasure.
Green, a distinctive and interesting filmmaker (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow) tackling his first literary adaptation, once again explores the coming-of-age passage and small-town dynamics, using a flashback to tell three interlocking stories.
Based on Stewart O'Nan's 1994 novel, which was set in western Pennsylvania in 1974, Snow Angels has been transplanted to the present time in an unnamed place.
Kate Beckinsale (far right) plays Annie, the thirtysomething working-class mom who is separated from her suicidal husband Glenn, a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian, played by Sam Rockwell (near right), whom she seriously plans to divorce. Waitress Annie, who has a four-year-old daughter, works at a Chinese restaurant along with a smitten dishwasher (Michael Angarano) for whom she used to babysit.
That young man is also going through the imminent divorce of his parents, and he's begun a tentative flirtation with Olivia Thirlby (who played the best friend of the title character in Juno). Their first-love teenage romance, sensitively depicted, is meant to suggest the hopeful ways that the two now-deteriorating adult relationships might have started out, long before everything went south.
Now Annie is having an affair with the husband (Nicky Katt) of a waitress co-worker (Amy Sedaris).
Glenn tries desperately to re-ingratiate himself with Annie and their daughter, but Annie, who has gotten a restraining order against him, will have none of it. And when the unstable Glenn gets wind of her romantic entanglement, hell, which by then will have already broken loose, will go on a rampage of unspeakable tragedy.
Director Green, perhaps a better cinematic poet than dramatist, gets strong performances from his actors and assigns them consistently interesting and naturalistic dialogue. But when the awful climactic events occur, they do not quite feel organic to the tapestry that has been woven to lead up to them.
So we'll reconcile a respectable but disappointed 2½ stars out of 4 for an unrelievedly dark and stark drama about grief and loss and despair that's aimed at a mature, thoughtful, forgiving audience. You may ultimately appreciate this almost grotesquely melancholy work, but you will also find Snow Angels devilishly difficult to enjoy.
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Kate Beckinsale (far right) plays Annie, the thirtysomething working-class mom who is separated from her suicidal husband Glenn, a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian, played by Sam Rockwell (near right), whom she seriously plans to divorce. Waitress Annie, who has a four-year-old daughter, works at a Chinese restaurant along with a smitten dishwasher (Michael Angarano) for whom she used to babysit.
