“Snow Angels” bleakly examines young love

In a snow-encrusted town, far from the muggy Southern byways where North Carolina-educated director David Gordon Green made his reputation (starting with 2001’s George Washington), a woman tries, half-heartedly, to distance herself from her sad fuck-up of a husband, her former high-school sweetheart. Meanwhile, a high schooler she used to baby-sit makes tentative, funny passes at a cute girl in glasses. The moral wouldn’t be out of place in a country song, but it’s heavy lifting for a drama starring Kate Beckinsale: Young love is sweet as fresh-fallen fruit, but then it putrifies, liquefies, drains away.

Beckinsale plays Annie, a young mother and waitress in a Chinese restaurant run entirely by white people. She acts like she’s above it all, and since she looks like Kate Beckinsale, we believe her—even though she’s sleeping with the husband of her best friend (Amy Sedaris, distinctly out of her element in a dramatic role). But her husband (the excellent Sam Rockwell) is determined to keep her in his life, dragging her along as he ricochets between alcoholic blackouts and equally selfish bursts of Christian fervor. Their conversations are hard to watch: Sam earnestly believes he must express his affection to win his wife back; Annie is patient with him, but she’s almost as turned off by his desperation as his inability to hold onto a job. The future does not look good for either parent—or their young daughter.

But every time this dismal story (which soon turns into a dismaying thriller) threatens to suffocate the movie, Green shifts back to the one of the freshest, most adorable teenage seductions ever put to film. Two shockingly charismatic kids, Lila (Olivia Thirlby, last wasted in Juno) and Arthur (Michael Angarano), borrow pencils and compliment each other’s shoes and do everything they can think of not to confess their affections—until finally the excuses run out. The transitions between Annie and Sam’s rotten relationship and the teenagers’ dewy infatuation can seem abrupt. But perhaps only jarring juxtapositions can lead you to ponder the unthinkable: that once upon a time, Annie and Sam were as cute and young and excited to be in love as Lila and Arthur are now.

SNOW ANGELS DIR. DAVID GORDON GREEN | RATED R | AT SELECT THEATERS IN LA AND OC

Tags: Film, Reviews, snow angels