Snow Angels
October 5, 2008
In a small snowy town, David Gordon Green examines love and all its messy entanglements through a series of characters each trying to cope with new life situations. Talented young actor Michael Angarano has feelings for flirtatious new student Olivia Thirlby, but the recent break-up of his parents has his mind preoccupied, as does his friend and co-worker Kate Beckinsale, whose mess of an ex-husband (Sam Rockwell) is constantly trying to shoehorn his way back into her life. Those are the three main stages of relationships Green focuses on - young, tentative high school love, separation after a long marriage of lies and buried emotions, and post-divorce awkwardness and hatred – he also throws in another co-worker (Amy Sedaris) who leaves her husband after the revelation of infidelity, but it's those core relationships, and what happens when the young child caught in the middle goes missing, that serves Green most dramatically. This is a difficult film, not a lot of hope to be squeezed from these characters, even the sweetness of the teenagers is cut some by the template set by their elders (is this what we have to look forward to?), but Green is a talented director, shaping Stewart O'Nan's novel into a carefully observed study of human interaction and the toll of falling in and out of love, and in Angarano and Thirlby's story, we have the closest representation of high school realism and the pangs of a serious first crush since the first season of “Friday Night Lights”.
By Adam Suraf