Snow Angels (David Gordon Green, 2008)

[John Cope]

I actually concur with domino on this one. I saw it a few weeks back and thought it was quite awful for all the reasons he describes. It really is too bad as Green is beginning to seem like yet another of those early promise directors who are appropriated by a machine (in this case "indie-wood") and whose own best characteristics are summarily eliminated or unrecognizably co-modified. I saw nothing here distinctive from any other attempt at despair driven-family a shambles-rural underclass mood piece.

What set Green apart at first in the magnificent George Washington was that he harnessed familiar elements of other peoples' style and applied them to his own imaginative, even visionary methodology. Also, he understood those aspects of style in terms of their functional use, what their essence dictated and what they could be used for. So it was never just a case of someone "ripping off" Burnett, Malick or Korine. Green's approach was, once again at first, masterful because he put distinctive aspects of these directors' aesthetics into dialogue and shaped what this produced in order to present a truth representative of not just a region but also a sensibility. Snow Angels on the other hand, and to one degree or another everything that has come in between his first film and this one (though this is his worst by far), simply evidences a dogmatically observed play book attitude, rarely brought to life by any particular or authentic seeming point of view other than pure quirks. For the most part in Snow Angels he doesn't even try. Undertow, by contrast, looks positively original, which it certainly isn't.

I was disappointed that Green didn't have a commentary on this though as I would have liked to have heard his thoughts on the source material (anyone here read it?). I'm curious how close this was as I wonder how much to blame the source itself is for such maudlin and fundamentally banal material. But I also wonder about it because I'm interested in whether Green felt compelled to be ultra faithful to it to his own detriment. All the stuff with the teen romance could have and should have been dropped, regardless of how sensitively it was handled. As domino implies, it distracts from rather than fortifies the main theme; however, in this case it hardly matters as the main theme is abysmally trite and so very insufficient as an honest approach to trauma in its triteness. Quite honestly, I found the viewing experience painful and not for any productive reason.

Have to agree as well about Rockwell. He is always great and is, in fact, so good in Choke he makes that execrable little picture worth watching. Once.