‘Sometimes we do things we can’t explain…’
David Gordon Green is perhaps best known now for absolutely destroying both the Halloween franchise and the The Exorcist reboot. Halloween Ends and The Exorcist: Believer are undoubtedly absolutely terrible films, but he must have done something right to merit being given the reigns to all that IP in the first place. Enter, Snow Angels…
Before pivoting into comedy (Pineapple Express) and horror (the aforementioned), Green began life as an indie director making small-budget indie dramas. Snow Angels very much falls into that category. Glenn (Sam Rockwell) is a fuck up. He has a drink problem, he’s estranged from his wife Annie (Kate Beckinsale) and he’s recovering from a suicide bid. Snow Angels is an attempt to understand why this man has become what he has become whilst also serving as a commentary on depression in small-town America. In a subplot, Arthur (Michael Angarano) an outsider and high school kid begins a sweet romance with local girl Lila (Olivia Thirlby).
Snow Angels is bursting with ideas, and it’s easy to see why Green ended up landing some big projects off the back of it, but the worldbuilding is so rich and emotionally resonant that this would have been perfect for a slow-burn HBO mini-series. In its final form, the film ends up introducing several fascinating plot strands whilst only ever concluding one of them in a satisfactory way (that of Glenn). Having said that, Snow Angels is worth watching if not just for the electric chemistry shared by Rockwell and Beckinsale (the latter of whom delivers a career-best performance), and their icy, melancholic nostalgia is perfectly matched by the snowy mountains of Nova Scotia.
Snow Angels is close to being a ‘great’ film but in the end, it will have to settle for being merely a ‘good’ one. If only Green could have brought some of this energy to his horror stuff then perhaps his career wouldn’t be all but over.