Over the last eight or so years, young director David Gordon Green
has, in relative obscurity, become one of the most emotionally
arresting, quietly unconventional voices in contemporary American
cinema. Picking up where Terrence Malick left off circa 1974, Green’s
first two films—the celebrated (if seldom seen) George
Washington and All the Real Girls—were contemporary
Southern meditations, told with hushed, atmospheric landscapes and
patient, stream-of-consciousness dialogue. With Snow Angels, his
first film since the critically and commercially slept-on
Undertow, the indie auteur attempts to marry elements of his
incredibly singular world with a more traditional narrative—with
satisfying, if occasionally awkward, results.
“I wanted Snow Angels to be a departure in a lot of ways,”
explains the writer/director (and adult braces wearer), in town
recently for a Portland International Film Festival-related press
junket. “It’s my first film based on a book, so there was a roadmap of
what happens—and a depth of character that I’d never really
considered before. I also wanted it to be a departure from the
South—I knew I wanted to go someplace cold.”
Physically speaking, that cold place is sleepy suburban
Pennsylvania: the white-swept and rusted cousin to the monochromatic
South of Green’s previous films. Based on a novel by Stewart O’Nan,
Snow Angels weaves together several weeks in the life of a
teenage boy (Michael Angarano), his former babysitter (a surprisingly
solid Kate Beckinsale), and her estranged, alcoholic, and newly
born-again husband (Sam Rockwell) as they each attempt to reconcile
themselves with freshly felt tragedy. Locale aside, it’s also much
colder in tone than its predecessors—abandoning the romantic,
fleeting lyricism so ingrained with the feel of Green’s previous films
for a more darkened depth of character, and a much bleaker whole.
“When I go back and watch my other films,” Green admits, “a lot of
it just feels so mannered and intentionally poetic, and sometimes
pretentious and overly stylized. They were written very stream of
consciousness, almost in a disposable way—where you can take out
any scene and you don’t need it. There is very little in those movies
that’s essential to telling the story, because there’s really not that
much of a story. With Snow Angels, I really did try to take some
kind of technical consideration as to how the story was constructed,”
he says, then laughs. “Which is something that I usually ignore.”
The result of Green’s newfound professionalism is still somewhat
uneven—tainting the largely powerful film with the faint scent of
transition. Snow Angels feels at times like two disparate acts
from completely different plays—the first half is a flatly
conventional suburban drama, and the second is… well… a David
Gordon Green film. What on paper sounds perhaps like it might be an
intentional upset of traditional dramatic narrative seems on screen to
more likely be Green’s struggle to marry the strengths of his aesthetic
with more palatable, commercial enterprises. (For further evidence of
Green’s current commercial jones, one need look no further than the
director’s next unlikely project: the latest Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen
stoner flick, Pineapple Express.) When it works—as it does
most of the time—it works masterfully (beautifully static
tracking shots, long wordless takes, etc.); when it doesn’t, Green’s
world just seems out of place and unwieldy.