With the sublimely moving "Snow Angels," writer-director David Gordon Green has made the best film about parents, children and relational perils since "Little Children." In many ways this film offers the richer experience, more troubling and, for all its bleakness, more satisfying on an emotional level. It's not easy to watch the worst of what happens here. But you never sense Green and his ensemble of actors pushing for effect, even when they're striving for a daring mixture of drama and mordant humor, hopelessness and hope.
Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story. You experience a full range of relationships in this picture. His adaptation of the Stewart O'Nan novel improves on the original, adding a few shafts of light that weren't detectable in the source material. The film's nearest tonal equivalent may be the old Replacements song "Sadly Beautiful," which if you haven't heard it, digs into a kind of heartache that comes from character, as opposed to the usual pop impulses.
O'Nan's 1994 novel was set in the 1970s and narrated by an adult looking back at his fraught teenage years in a small Pennsylvania town, rocked first by one death, then by a murder, then by a suicide. (This isn't "Enchanted.") The film, which Green shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has been relocated to the present, in an unspecified place. Young Arthur, played by Michael Angarano - best screen teen, deadpan male division, since Michael Cera - is first seen with his fellow high school marching bandmates on the practice field, while their teacher, Mr. Chervenick, blows a gasket about the sloppy formations. You think: This is a comedy?
A few seconds later, when gunshots ring out in the distance, you realize Green has set us up for precisely the mixture of tones he's after in "Snow Angels." It's a roundelay of ordinary people with ordinary problems. Only some of them get fatally out of hand.
Arthur's professor father, played by Griffin Dunne, has moved out of his marriage to Arthur's mother, played by Jeannetta Arnette. This family's crumbling but coping state contrasts sharply with the more central couple, played by Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell. Beckinsale's Annie, all tension and not enough release, used to be Arthur's baby sitter. Now they work together at a local restaurant. Annie's having an affair with the husband of a co-worker played by Amy Sedaris; meantime, Annie's separated from husband Glenn (Rockwell), a well-meaning screw-up, born again and battling alcoholism. Annie and Glenn's daughter plays a key role in the narrative, the events of which grow ever more threatening.
Adapter-director Green, whose earlier self-written works include the poetically charged "George Washington," rightly sensed an almost suffocatingly dour project in the making with "Snow Angels." He took care of the problem beautifully. Arthur is a nice, quiet kid in crisis, forced to adapt to a slippery home life, then a tragedy. But "Snow Angels" finds just enough time and room to focus on Arthur's budding romance with a wonderful nerd with a box camera, a newly transferred student played by Olivia Thirlby. (She was Ellen Page's best pal in "Juno.") There's so much life and charm and magic in this story line that a few scenes add up to one of the most authentic and sweet teen romances I can recall seeing on screen in years.
If it weren't in there, "Snow Angels" might be simply a worthy but difficult effort. As is, the film carries the stealth impact of a great short story. Even with the arguable miscasting of Beckinsale - she has to work a little harder than some of her cohorts at playing a small-town working-class character - each performance is just right. I don't understand the critics who find "Snow Angels" to be the most depressing thing since the last election, or a peculiar, unstable mixture of tones. Green and company know where they're going in every scene, and every scene exists at a vivid intersection between the neatness of fiction and the emotional stuff of life.
