Snow Angels

[modage]

he shot an entire movie and is editing it and not one word leaked out about this till now?  jeezus christ, that is quiet.

from the Premiere interview with Kate Beckinsdale...

PREMIERE: What else do you have in the works?
KATE BECKINSDALE: I've just done a drama, an independant called Snow Angels with David Gordon Green, who did All The Real Girls and Undertow.  I'm a waitress with a young daughter, and my ex-husband, Sam Rockwell, has become a crazy born-again Christian, slightly obsessive, wanting to get back with me. 

[Pozer]

Holy hELL!  He's completed Snow AngELS?!  And with RockwELL and BeckinsdALE?!   

[MacGuffin]

Wow, where was I in December?

Beckinsale is Green's New "Angel"
Monday, Dec. 19, 2005

Variety reports that Kate Beckinsale will star in indie darling David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels," which begins shooting early next year.

"Kate Beckinsale has signed on for a lead role in David Gordon Green's latest pic, "Snow Angels." Sam Rockwell and Olivia Thirlby also star in the indie, which starts shooting in February.

Beckinsale will play a small-town waitress who has suffered through a tumultuous relationship with her estranged husband (Rockwell).

Gordon Green adapted the script from the novel by Stewart O'Nan."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453548/

[JG]

preview of the film for Sundance here.

[Xx]

...

[MacGuffin]

PARK CITY '07 REVIEW | Quiet Anger: David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels"
by Steve Ramos; indieWIRE

The moment in "Snow Angels" that qualifies stand-alone filmmaker David Gordon Green as the most artful of film masters occurs when Glenn (Sam Rockwell), a broken man, dances with two drunken patrons at a rundown tavern in the small Pennsylvania town he calls home. A birthday cake sits on a nearby pinball table without explanation. The room is dark, so dark that it's hard to say if one of the shuffling patrons holding Glenn is a man or woman. But everything is placed with the same attention to perfect detail as his previous three feature films, "Undertow," "All the Real Girls" and his best film, "George Washington."

Glenn's dance brims with true human feeling. It's a brave sequence, something I can't imagine another American filmmaker attempting. That's what separates Green's filmmaking from all others - his bravery for tackling unique storytelling.

Glenn (Rockwell) and his pretty wife Annie (Kate Beckinsale) have separated and both struggle to piece their lives back together. Glenn wants reconciliation with his wife and young daughter. Meanwhile, she embarks on an affair with a married man. As bad decisions lead to tragedies, "Snow Angels" makes a turn midway and shifts from family melodrama to a a thriller with a climax alongside a frozen lake. Of course, this is a thriller done the David Gordon Green way, meaning it's quiet, subtle and completely natural.

Sam Rockwell gives a physical performance, bashing his head against his pick-up truck. Rockwell does what Green needs everyone to do - he comes off believably as a regular Joe. Michael Angarano puts his aw-shucks personality to good use as Arthur, an affable teen who works with Annie. Olivia Thirlby stands out as Arthur's nerdy girlfriend. Theirs is the sweetest on-screen kiss in recent memory.

The only false notes belong to the too beautiful Kate Beckinsale. It's as if she's the only cast member who refused to wipe away her Hollywood make up for the sake of the story. "Snow Angels" is Green's first film shot above the Mason Dixon line as well as the first feature he adapted from a novel instead of his own writing. Yet, "Snow Angels" syncs perfectly with everything Green has shown audiences up to this point (including beautiful work from his regular cameraman Tim Orr). Green's growth is his ability to craft suspense.

The undeniable truth of Green's filmmaking is that there is no ambivalence about his movies. You either love his sense of deliberately paced naturalism or you find it lulling. Point Blank: I am a fan and will always celebrate his work.

[JG]

a little spoilerish

Variety Review

Mysteriously structured around two broken families and two fateful gunshots, "Snow Angels" reps a chilly departure for David Gordon Green. Tackling his first literary adaptation, the acclaimed writer-director has assembled a rich but uneven panorama of human suffering in a small town, awkwardly filtered through a young man's coming-of-age story. Emotionally harrowing and gentle by turns, this well-acted winter's tale is a more narrative-driven experience than Green's more lyrical Sundance entries, "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls," which may help it generate marginally stronger returns in specialized release despite mixed critical response.

The very title of Green's new project suggests an icy remove from the grime and sweat of his 2004 Southern-gothic thriller "Undertow," as well as "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls," which were both set in North Carolina. "Snow Angels" was shot in the much cooler climes of Nova Scotia, though unlike Stewart O'Nan's original novel — set in western Pennsylvania in 1974 — the film unspools in an unspecified location in the present day.

The opening shot of a high school marching band practicing on a football field, the camera weaving lazily in and out of their formations, at first seems entirely consistent with Green's poetic sensibility. But the narrative engine soon kicks in when the band members, including trombone player Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano), are caught off-guard by the distant but unmistakable sound of gunfire.

The film flashes back to weeks earlier, laying out two parallel threads that we now know are destined to converge. Arthur, 16, works part-time at a Chinese restaurant alongside Annie Marchand (Kate Beckinsale), a beautiful thirtysomething on whom he's always held an innocent crush.

Annie is having an affair with Nate Petite (Nicky Katt), who's married to her tough-talking friend and co-worker, Barb (Amy Sedaris, in a small triumph of offbeat casting). Meanwhile, Annie's ex-husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell), a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian, persistently tries to get back into the good graces of her and their four-year-old daughter, Tara (Grace Hudson). Annie and Glenn rightfully assume center stage as the most tortured and conflicted figures in the drama, as Annie's perfidy is revealed and Glenn subsequently falls off the wagon — allowing his violent, controlling nature to re-emerge, often in the name of religion.

Next to all this emotional turmoil, Arthur's story exists at a curious remove from the action, and is muted and low-key by comparison. Coping with his own parents' recent separation, the shy teen begins hanging out with Lila (Olivia Thirlby), a girl with a winningly offbeat personality and a talent for photography. As he demonstrated in "All the Real Girls," Green has a gift for capturing the tenderness and spontaneity of young love, and Angarano and Thirlby's moments together have a sweet, unabashedly sincere ring to them.

For audiences, pinpointing the elusive connection between the two threads will prove the heart of the matter. Aside from the fact that in each instance, a rejected father attempts to reconcile with wife and child, the film's most understated and resonant suggestion is that Annie and Glenn were once as passionately in love as Arthur and Lila are.

An unforeseeable accident at the midpoint confirms the film's superficial resemblance to other wintry examinations of family tragedy like "The Sweet Hereafter" and "The Ice Storm." For the most part, Green maintains an impressive control over the script's shifts in tone, even adding some wry humor to what could have been an oppressively bleak picture. It's the director's way of saying that domestic life (and drama, for that matter) is more than just the sum of its miseries.

Yet that sensibility ends up costing the film some credibility in its final, violent moments, and its explanation of those mysterious gunshots feels both agonizing and curiously rote. Green may be following O'Nan's text, but this wouldn't be the first such film to use a climactic tragedy to resolve what should, in theory, be unresolvable.

In the end, "Snow Angels" is perhaps best understood as a study in community isolation, in which personal connections are inevitably fleeting and the private pain of others, as suggested by the final shot, is all too easily forgotten.

Rockwell's wounded, self-lacerating histrionics capture Glenn's rapid transformation from an eager-to-please guy to a frighteningly unstable personality, his cocktail of booze and religious fanaticism no less moving for being so misguided. Beckinsale firmly holds the screen against him, and her emotional range expands rewardingly as Annie's rejections of Glenn become angrier and more pronounced.

The challenge of adapting someone else's material has resulted in a more concrete, earthbound work than one expects from Green, with fewer Terrence Malick-like visual abstractions. Still, the camera (wielded by the helmer's regular d.p., Tim Orr) does lurch poetically skyward on occasion, while the beautiful outdoor photography extends Green's fascination with nature as a realm of beauty and danger, a place where men, women and children alike experience their final reckonings.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932497.html?categoryid=2471&cs=1&query=snow+angels

[Pozer]

usually only xixax reviews get me (even more) excited about certain movies, but somehow the indieWIRE one just shot my anticipation to the clouds 

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from an AICN review...

It’s a very grim and dark picture, but I think it’s quite a worthwhile trip. I also think it’s the best film that David Gordon Green has made to date.  In a way I kind of feel like All the Real Girls and Undertow were just larger-budget training for this film, because with Snow Angels Green has hit the ball way out of the park, I don’t think I will be seeing a better movie at Sundance than his film.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/31314

[MacGuffin]

Snow Angels
Bottom Line: A grim tale of three relationships, naturalistically scoped for mature audiences.
Duane Byrge; Hollywood Reporter

PARK CITY -- A hard-scrabble Northern community is darkly scoped in filmmaker David Gordon Green's flinty depiction of three interrelated relationships. Ironically-titled "Snow Angels" is no happy depiction of the joys of winter or life, but rather a naturalistic and decidedly harsh glimpse into tangled, everyday lives. An appreciative, if muted audience, reacted positively to this naturalistic tale here at Sundance.

The three relationships distilled and cross-connected in "Snow Angels" might be separately labeled: beginning, middle and end. The beginning relationship centers on an observant high-school trombonist (Michael Angarano) who begins his first "serious" romance with a new-girl (Oliver Thirlby) photographer in school; the second perambulates on the trombonist's own parents who are navigating a separation, while the third courses through a marriage that has ended but is still savagely explosive.

Told contextually as filmmaker David Gordon Green interweaves the three "romances," "Snow Angels' is unsparing in its depiction of the pain of relationships. While often hard to watch because of its unflinching portrayal of the ugliness that love can take, "Snow Angels" succeeds because of the depth of its well-drawn characters. With no cinematic sugarcoating, it's an organic story that draws us in to these people's lives, as flawed and destructive as they may be.

The portrayals are across-the-board well-realized. In particular, Sam Rockwell is powerful as the addictive, grandiose ex-husband who malevolently clings to his once happy family. As his pressurized ex-wife, Kate Beckinsale is sympathetic as a working woman who bravely tries to endure. On the lighter/younger side, Michael Angarano is appealingly awkward as the love-smitten high-school student. Also, Griffin Dunne is convincing as his self-centered, philandering father, while Amy Sedaris is nicely spunky as a rag-tag waitress. 
The technical contributions smartly congeal; specifically, the multi-parted storylines are brilliantly connected by William Anderson's lucid editing.


SNOW ANGELS
Crossroads Films and True Love Productions Present
A Crossroads Films Production

Producers: Dan Lindau, Paul Miller, Lisa Muskat, Cami Taylor; Screenwriter/director: David Gordon Green; Based on the novel by Stewart O'Nan; Executive producer: Jeanne Donovan-Fisher; Director of photography: Tim Orr; Production designer: Richard Wright: Music: David Wingo, Jeff McIlwain: Casting: Billy Hopkins, Suzanne Crowley, Kerry Barden, Paul Schnee. Cast: Annie Marchand: Kate Beckinsale; Glenn Marchand: Sam Rockwell; Arthur Parkinson: Michael Angarano; Don Parkinson: Griffin Dunne; Nate Petite: Nicky Katt; Mr. Chervenick: Tom Noonan; Warren Hardesky: Connor Paolo; Barb Petite: Amy Sedaris; Lila Raybern: Olivia Thirby

No MPAA Rating, Running time -- 106 minutes

[MacGuffin]

Sundance Review: Snow Angels
Source: Cinematical

With his first three films -- George Washington, All the Real Girls and Undertow -- writer-director David Gordon Green swiftly established his aesthetic: His films explore small-town life in the modern world, set in communities large enough to feel lost in but small enough to feel confining; they're all shot with a flat-yet-artful look that finds art in the real; they each feature strong performances that manage to make an impression without ever feeling forced; their dialogue is natural and human yet engaged and energetic. Snow Angels, Green's fourth film, keeps within that range, telling the story of lives and loves lost and found in a small New England town at winter time, but it's also a departure; it's Green's first adaptation (of a novel by Stewart O'Nan), and with actors like Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale and Griffin Dunne, it features his biggest-name cast to date. It's still a film that's identifiably his, even as it has the potential to turn him from a lesser-known indie director into an A-level dramatist.

Glenn (Rockwell) and Annie (Beckinsale) Marchand are separated; Annie's trying to raise their daughter Tara, while Glenn's born again with Jesus and killing himself slowly with alcohol. Annie works at the local Chinese restaurant -- the sort of place where the staff have to wear pseudo-Asian tops -- alongside Arthur (Michael Angarano), a teen she used to babysit. Arthur's parents (Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette) are splitting up, even as Arthur's becoming friends and more with new transfer student Lila (Olivia Thirlby). Both Glenn and Annie are leaning on their parents -- Glenn's moved back in with his folks, pretty much, while Annie's relying on her mom as cheap childcare while juggling work and an affair with Nate, (Nicky Katt), a co-worker's husband. Things grind along for all the characters -- the blend of small victories and petty defeats that makes up life -- until, one day, one simple thing goes horribly, terribly wrong. And everyone, everything is changed.

Snow Angels' plot may evoke other small-town dramas -- I felt echoes of Atom Egoyan's Exotica, for one -- but at the same time, the film speaks to much more than any plot synopsis can capture. Many of the characters here are in that miserable middle ground where you have a child and yet are a child -- having maturity thrust upon you and wrenched away in the span of a few short minutes. And John Lennon's classic aphorism -- that life is what happens while you're making other plans -- is acted out as well, from Annie's affair with the kind-yet callow Nate to Arthur's slow, sweet relationship with Lila.

If there's a weakness in Snow Angels -- or, rather, one moment that's not as superbly crafted and impressive as all the others around it -- it might be in the characterization of Thirlby's Lila. The quirky-cute, smart-hot plucky life-affirming sprite female character is fast becoming a cliché in modern indie film -- look to Natalie Portman's dime-thin characterization in Garden State for an example of the phenomenon at it's worst -- and while Thirlby has a certain presence, Lila isn't as fully-crafted as some of the other lead characters.

But as ever, Green's skill and inate craft shine through, from the real unforced quality of the dialogue to the carefully-wrought performances. Beckinsale depicts Annie a good-hearted, slightly-overwhelmed woman; Rockwell brings Glenn's mix of good-natured charm and badly-intentioned confusion to life; Angarano makes Arthur feel like a true-life teen, rendered both comfortable and afflicted by his parent's money and separation. And Green, adapting O'Nan's novel, not only captures two seemingly polar experiences --- the warm confusion of young romance and the cold understanding of love's end -- but makes us understand and see how they are linked, even while holding out the cruel/kind possibility that they might not be.

I find lately (and never more so than at Sundance, where it's easy to feel smothered by a drama-lanche of pathos and passion) that when I go into a drama, I want -- no, I need -- to feel like it can convey the real nature of life: How wonderful it can be, and how horrible; how the is joy, and there is pain; how there are elegant dreams we can aspire to and ugly facts we must face; that the only thing as certain as death is the necessity of the fight against it. Snow Angels -- human, humane, funny, tragic, artful, real -- is one of the strongest dramas of Sundance 2007; more importantly, it has the craft and power to stand as one of the best dramas of the year, period.

[MacGuffin]

Sundance Audio Interview: 'Snow Angels' Director David Gordon Green
Source: Cinematical

With three amazing films to his name -- George Washington, All the Real Girls and Undertow -- David Gordon Green may be the best director you've never heard of. At this year's Sundance Film Festival, Green's Snow Angels has earned critical respect and audience praise; At the Kimball Arts Center, Green spoke with Cinematical about directing his first adaptation, working with Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale, and on his unexpected next film. The interview can be downloaded

[JG]

If anyone is in Brooklyn in late May\early June , maybe you can catch Snow Angels before it's 2008 release in the Sundance at BAM series.

From TheReeler.com
Sundance at BAM Gets Local for '07

By S.T. VanAirsdale

The second year of Sundance at BAM is locked for May 31-June 10, with 16 dramatic and documentary features and 27 shorts from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival featured in the program. A few of my '07 favorites are here, including the Documentary Jury Prize winner Manda Bala, Jeffrey Blitz's brilliant narrative debut Rocket Science, the New York premiere of David Gordon Green's Snow Angels and the excellent shorts Death to the Tinman, Motodrom, Salt Kiss and God Provides. A few unusual choices that make geographic sense — the New Yorker-directed, current ND/NF selections Padre Nuestro and The Great World of Sound; the utterly awful NYC shutterbug/buddy flick Delirious — are showcased as well.

http://dgg.takethemoneyandrun.org/archives/124

[Pozer]

didnt modge or ghosty or someone here see this?  and if so, how come no review?

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i saw it.  it was good.  and i fell in love with this girl. 


(on the right)

she was actually at the screening too (along with DGG) and i actually ended up seeing her again a few weeks ago filming something in Soho.  but she doesn't wear those horn rimmed glasses in real life so, it just wasn't the same.