Hancock

Wanted

The Love Guru

Get Smart

The Incredible Hulk

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Sex and the City

Savage Grace

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Surfwise

What Happens in Vegas

Iron Man

Son of Rambow

Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale are estranged couple Glenn and Annie Marchand.

A lonely small town in dead of winter. A deliberate, naturalistic pace. An estranged couple with a young daughter trying to piece together some grace after the alcoholic, born-again Christian husband Glenn Marchand (Sam Rockwell) has made a suicide attempt and the wife Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is embarking on a relationship with a co-worker's husband. And then more tragedy follows. Yep, this sounds like a Sundance Film Festival sort of movie, and indeed this movie -- directed by the gifted David Gordon Green (Undertow, All the Real Girls) from the novel by Stewart O'Nan -- played there in 2007 to some deserved attention. Sad, touching, wryly funny and deeply melancholy, Snow Angels unsparingly charts three relationships in varying stages, the single light note of the trio involving a high school trombone player (Michael Angaro) swept up in a new romance with a smart-mouthed photographer (Olivia Thirlby). Although Green's dissection of small-town ennui and intersecting lives shattered by love doesn't quite knock it out of the park with the chilly, scalpel-like mastery of, say, Todd Field in Little Children or In The Bedroom, he's definitely made a well-shot, brutally honest movie inflected with moments of power and subtlety.
Teenage trombonist Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano) finds love with photographer Lila Raybern (Olivia Thirlby). It's never less than well acted by Rockwell, who often walks the line of pushing too hard but mostly stays on the right side here. Although Beckinsale is a dazzling visual wonder as a vampire warrior in her Underworld epics, she proves again what an accomplished, nuanced performer she is. Thirlby, as she showed in Juno playing the heroine's best pal, is a real find. And, unlike many other Sundance ain't-life-a-struggle films, the movie at least opens and closes on a wistful, optimistic note. With this much grim pain and suffering on display, you need something positive to cling onto.

by Stephen Rebello

Photos: Chris Reardon/©2006 Snow Blower Productions, L.L.C.