You may or may not remember David Gordon Green as the man behind last year's stoner comedy Pineapple Express, depending on how attentive you were during its opening credits. Were you looking? Such a question isn't put forward to highlight the passiveness of the average cinemagoer - I bang on about that topic quite enough - rather it is a remark on how surprising it would be to find such an intimate filmmaker as Gordon Green crafting such a loud, boorish film of this caliber. After all, the attachment of Gordon Green to such a project as Pineapple Express came as a surprise to many; the filmmaker has long stayed on the fringes of the independent scene for much of his career, crafting small underrated films such as All the Real Girls and George Washington, the latter of which cost just $42,000 to make. Coming into 2008, David Gordon Green wasn't exactly the man you'd tip to be directing a Seth Rogen stoner comedy.
Frustration and boredom were my two main feelings toward Pineapple Express, so much that I found myself seeing what the out-of-focus extras were up to as opposed to watching Rogen's char-grilled face. But enough of that. David Gordon Green's move into the mainstream was not as big as sacrifice as first thought, as his second feature of 2008, Snow Angels, was a typical Gordon Green outing as any you'd find, yet entirely of its own qualities. With Pineapple Express satisfying the mainstream crowd and introducing the wider world to his name (though not necessarily his style), along with Snow Angels bringing back the faithful for another round of small-town poetic cinema, David Gordon Green was evidently keen to have it both ways in 2008.
Snow Angels features Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale as just two of many players in an interconnected tragedy. They play Glenn and Annie, a separated couple that can't quite keep the spectre of the past behind them. Glenn is an alcoholic, or was, and it is assumed that this addiction is what drew the wedge between himself and Annie in the first place. He's now found God, or so he believes. He asks questions of God one second, praising him the next. Co-workers have to put him straight on the scripture, knowing that he is more lost than he could ever know.
Annie, meanwhile, spends her days doing one of three things: looking after her daughter Tara, working in the restaurant, or having it off with a married moustached man in an out-of-the-way motel. After years of putting up with Glenn's nonsense, she's finally thinking about herself. Maybe in all the wrong ways. And Glenn, he may not even be thinking straight at all.
These aren't the best role models for Arthur (Michael Angarano), a young student who is on the brink of finding first love within the innocent confines of high school. Not only does Arthur have to contend with the overbearing conflict escalating between his parents, but he also has to stand by and watch Annie, his ex-babysitter with whom he once had a crush on, become even more embroiled in the mess she and Glenn created and are currently drowning in.
The landscape of the town in which these characters exist is, as the title would suggest, coated in snow. The whites of the woods are finely captured, the individuals stranded alone in their surroundings, intimating that even in a peopled settlement, one person can feel so isolated spiritually and emotionally. Perhaps some of them, possibly the selfish ones, do exist by themselves.
This is a tale of innocence lost, of the sins of the fathers being put on display for those burgeoning into life to discover and learn from. It is a haunting sequence of events with no implication or reasoning for an uplifting finish. Life isn't always about happy endings. Even when we don't experience our own personal tragedies, the pains of others are eternally present in every passing day. Snow Angels doesn't have anything particularly insightful to say about such instances, but its presentation of such moments is at once elegaic and emotionally resonant.
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