NOTHING LIKE A BITTERSWEET COMEDY-TRAGEDY AT 8:30 IN THE MORNING at Sundance: sigh. David Gordon Green’s fourth feature, the casual yet deeply serious, soulful Snow Angels continues along his own lovely path, reaching into particulars of working class life with wit and empathy. Life is a river, and sometimes it freezes over: Gordon, working with generous breadth in adapting Stewart O’Nan’s book, warms the heart. The cast is large, Altman-sized. Green moves between them fluidly. There are at least ten major characters, their interactions marshaled with novelistic care. It’s a tapestry of overwhelming complication, adroitly described, demonstrating well the abiding truth that you must forgive trespasses in tiny towns. Set in an unnamed Pennsylvania town (but shot in Nova Scotia), the movie conveys the chill of disillusionment, yet in the foreground or in the corner of many of the widescreen shots, tendrils reach. Trees, rooted, that will revive come spring. Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is the mother of Tara, a small girl. Working as one part of the seemingly entirely non-Asian staff of the local China Town restaurant, Annie tries to avoid estranged husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), who’s developed a few messianic tics since their separation, and keep meetings with Nate (Nicky Katt), husband of China Town co-worker Barb (Amy Sedaris), a secret from all. Another co-worker is teenaged Arthur (Michael Angarano), whom Annie babysat for many years, and who is in a want-a-first-kiss flirtation with Lila, a proto-glamour-geek behind cats-eye glasses, under rats-nest tangle of dark hair (Olivia Thirlby). Theirs is a sweetly hopeful young romance despite the quietly catastrophic onset of middle-aged disillusionment in Arthur’s parents (still floppy-haired Griffin Dunne, weary yet luminous Jeanneta Arnette). The acting is very, very good, with the performers matching the capacity of Green’s fully furnished world to surprise from shot-to-shot.
The world falls apart terribly in this small, unspecified town and the landscape swallows many sorrows. And yet. Things change but life does not stop: young love, old love, they are as true as the hurts notched across years of acquaintance or relationship. Establishing shots are used as socioeconomic shorthand, and meticulously gathered props and interior design have talismanic weight.
As always, Green and his regular cinematographer Tim Orr observe landscape, working as the first-est second unit of them all. (How do they find the time to shoot all this concrete yet lyrical coverage?) Shots matter in movies like George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels: An overweight grandmother with faded tattoos on her forearm. Kate Beckinsale’s bare calf, cocked, across a motel room bedspread. Snowflakes on red wool. A lovemaking scene that builds from the elegant example of Don’t Look Now (plus a bonus goofball cunnilingus button). We see a boy in class seen drawing an enormous power transmission line, and Green cuts to the real line, which dominates a hillside and horizon without a lick of majesty. Among many other glorious instants, I would single out one of Lila, outdoors, watching Arthur leave the school grounds, taking a photograph of this boy to whom she is all the time more drawn; it’s from a bit of distance, and unsteady, framed just a little high on her as she looks over her glasses through the glass viewfinder of her twin-lensed medium format camera, contrasting geometry both above and below her of the outdoor stadium, and her bulky-at-the-base winter coat planting her there like a tree. The next couple of shots? Landscapes in the style of the photographs she’s taken: for a second, her eyes are the film’s omniscient vision. Green is good at this, at throwaway beauty. “Let me take your breath, okay? Now let’s move along.”
Dialogue matters to this still-young writer-director, too, as anyone who likes his films would tell you. A girl browsing a slang dictionary as a tease: “Fellatrix. I like that”; “If Tom Cruise were a little girlie, girlie, he’d look like you”; “Can you say that in Spanish?”; “She had a pickle”; “I’ll suck you right up my tailpipe, bud”; “I’m nice, aren’t I?… Do you have any idea of how adorably cute you are? … Right now?” And emotion, with motion: a girl’s “Stupid things you say make me like you even more,” caught in a handheld shot that moves uneasily back from a two-shot into an empty high school corridor, leaving them framed at the center of their world.
Aside from worthy embellishments on Robert Altman, Green makes a wry nod to Cameron Crowe with a bit involving a pencil earlier; the two men are parallel sweethearts. An end-credit bonus unlikely to be found in Altman or Crowe: there’s a tune in the movie entitled “Four Robots Fucking in A Wool Sock.”

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