Snow Angels is dark bleak film about the promise of what once was and the reality of what could have been, all set amidst the cold winter landscape of semi-rural pennsylvania. We watch as Glenn (Rockwell) who after a failed suicide attempt is estranged from wife Annie (Beckinsale, in her best role to date) slips ever further into madness as Annie pushes him away from her and their young daughter. Thus leading us into an ever darkening nightmare that will ultimately end in tragedy. The heaviness of the film is lightened with the story of burgeoning love between Arthur (Agarano) and Lila (Thirlby). Art and Lila are two high school students that meet innocently and slowly begin to fall in love with eachother. Agarano and Thirlby perfectly capture the essence and innocence of two young people falling in love for the first time, with all the awkwardness and self uncertainty that gos along with it. I almost wish that writer/director David Gordon Green devoted the majority of the film to these two as they were just that good. I see a really bright future for Olivia Thirlby if she keeps giving outstanding performances like she did here.

Grade B/B+

But see, the whole essence of this movie - and the reason it's so great and maybe my favorite Gorden Green work - is the ying and the yang of the two relationships. One is on a course of total and literal destruction, while another is opening and blossoming. I think the real power of the film lies in the juxtaposition of these two states of human connectivity. The movie runs you through an emotional wringer because of it. One minute you're caught up in the joy and rapture of new love, and the next you're stuck in the disintegration of not only a relationship, but the lives of the people touched by the relationship. I think this might be why a lot of people are having such trouble with the film. It leaves you conflicted, not really sure what to make of it. Is it depressing? You bet, but I also think it has a distinct underlining of hope. For every crushed dream or damaged soul, we see two young people discovering things for the first time with a world of opportunity in front of them. It's about the differing sides of human existence that seem to balance things out.

Very well put, makeshift. I dunno if it's my favorite, but I think it's his most mature and powerful yet. DGG's gift for applying life's universals to very specific people and situations abounds, but with a supercharged emotional resonance that is unmatched in his first three films. There's just something so much more meaningful about the mother/child and (potential) nuclear family relationships at risk here.

Yeah, I think that's very true. I also think a lot of the power in Gordon Green's movies (and particularly in Snow Angels) coincides with his innate ability to draw perception-altering performances out of his cast. Kate Beckinsale completely transcends any Underworld stereotype she may have associated with her here. She really gives one of the best, most heartbreaking performances I've seen in a long time. But you could say the same thing about anyone in the cast. I mean, Sam Rockwell's talent has always been readily apparent, but I don't think he has ever been better then he is here.

Gordon Green is, what... 30 years old? It's hard to imagine the type of movies he could be making in ten, twenty years.

to all.

I wanna see his comedy-western about 3 guys trying to kill a horse. haha.

I understood the dichotomous relationship between the parallel stories and agree with you that the power of the film lies in the juxtapostion. I stated that I 'almost' wished for more because the young love story was extremely well done and I didn't want the scenes with Thirlby and Angarano to end. The way DGG cut the film together we never really got more than a few minutes with our young lovers until we were thrust head long back into the trainwreck.
What dampend the film for me was I felt most of the male characters sometimes bordered on charactures of themselves, the dad was your typical mid-life crisis guy, Nate was the bored cheating husband, and Glenn just went a little to far at times. While the women were all independent, strong and fully developed. I liked the film but flt it came up just a bit short.

Makeshift
I agree with you on if DGG is making films this good in his early 30's then his films should only get better as he gos on.

SNOW ANGELS - 8/10 (B+)

A sad, disturbing, and shocking drama with really good performances.

As already stated, this is an incredibly sad film that is often quite shocking and disturbing. Some of the final moments made my jaw drop - I didn't see them coming at all. But it's an excellent film - incredibly well-directed and filled with absolutely magnificent performances. Kate Beckinsale is an a revelation here. I dare anyone to question her abilities as an actress after seeing her heartbreaking and unforgettable performance here. It's the best female performance of the year and worthy of an Oscar nomination in my eyes (though that definitely won't happen due to the fact that this was released earlier in the year). It's completely different from anything she's done before and she just commanded the screen in every way possible. Sam Rockwell was also fantastic and incredibly effective. The love story between Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby was very believable and heartwarming amidst all the tragedy that was occuring otherwise. I'd highly recommend this film - it's not an easy viewing experience, but it's a satisfying one, and worth seeing for Beckinsale's spellbinding performance alone. A-

I've had this on my computer for a while and haven't gotten around to watching it, but the reviews are really encouraging.

I agree with makeshift and kypade on the meat of the movie being in the contrast of the relationships, except I think you can take the analysis much deeper than the contrast of the two main beginning/ending relationships. Green is not using two, not three, but four relationship wheels here: Arthur and Lily, Barb and Nate, Don and Louise Parkinson, and Glen and Annie.

What is brilliant about this movie is how each one represents a step in the process of a relationship from perfect beginning to total black ending, and how each step bleeds into the next chronologically, going from perfection, to the shattering of this perfection, to the fall in its course, to destruction and death.

Arthur and Lily are the first step, through them we see a relationship's beginning, or really, the birth of it. We see the first meeting and eyeing, their courting, their first kiss, their first sex... the relationship is born and blossoms and we leave them in perfect happiness. Arthur and Lily are in fact, perfect beings, completley untainted and incapable of wrong.

The line then jumps to Barb and Nate. They represent, simply, the incident that causes the rift or breakup in the couple, the shattering of perfection, the beginning of the fall. While the jump in terms of age and status is big from Arthur and Lily to Barb and Nate, in this case age doesn't matter... the symbolism of going from happiness and stability, to getting hit with the "rift moment", is the same. Barb and Nate get the least screentime and development in this film but their place is essential to this progressive arc.

Continuing where they left off, Don and Louise Parkinson, Arthur's parents, show the results of the incident and seperation. They're now formally seperated and more sombre than the last couple, less joyful. They're obviously on the rocks, but with Don's mixtape at the end, we leave them in a moment of most importantly, hope, dominant them in the film... Their fate is still ambigious, they're on their way down and in the full midst of the fall, but can turn this thing around. Or they can't...

The last step is obviously Glen and Annie, who show what happens when you don't turn it around, when you lose all hope hit total destruction and blackness. They of course, end up falling deeper and deeper into darkness until absolute tragedy, and death.

What's even more brilliant about this is that it ties overall into the basic from comedy to tragedy meter. The basic classification of all stories, is you begin at the top, with comedies, where you have a happy ending and innocent, perfect beings, but as you go further and further down the drop, almost like a fall into a hole, you get more flawed, complex beings who do more and more morally wrong things, until of course you hit the bottom, complete tragedy, and destruction of the human soul completley. These stages are, in essence, symbolized and brought out in Snow Angels.

You could also tie symbolization of the relationship into symbolizing our life. We see the evolution fo the relationship from birth to the loss of perfection or I guess puberty, to maturity, to death. I'm no Catholocism expert but I'm guessing you could tie that in there somewhere too... the heaven and hell thing or whatever..

Oh, and has it been mentioned this movie is amazingly acted, shot, and edited? I'd heard the Beckinsale can actually act chatter, but ho. ly. shit... she jumped from Scarlett Johannson level to give her an Oscar level in like one film. Rockwell matches her, just brilliant. With the heavy melodrama these two are asked to pull off, it'd be VERY easy for most actors to slip into overacted and falsehood, but they pull it off immensely. Angarano, Thirlby, stars of the future. Arnette, Dunne, Katt, Sedaris, all great.

Absolutely one of the finest films of the year, if not the finest. David Gordon Green, this really makes up for the disappointment of All the Real Girls!

5/5

Can't wait to see this movie!!!

Dark, depressing, and disturbing. I was truly blown away by this film. It made me love Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale even more.

9.5/10

Not exactly 'hit all the right notes'. But very close, I'd say. Everything from the performance to the script, was just extremely fine but never hit the mark of the greatness, it either fell short or something prevented it to do so. But it was all covered up by the direction from Gordon Green, which was really impressive. His directing capability is not limited in controlling the mood or the tone of his film but spreading out to the ability in helping the script to flesh out the characters. As seen in many shots; a shot of cold falling snow, the wide open ice field, the sunlight infiltrates through the dry bough. These beautiful shots commune to the viewer very well with the inner sentiment of the character. Beneath the solidity, everything looked great with the flawless direction from David Gordon Gordon Green.

I liked Shack's analyze of this film being about the relationship at each step in the process, rise to fall and what are between. If you look it this way, this movie isn't really that depressing.

A-

Still think Beckinsale and Rockwell give probably the best performances of the year, in probably the best film of the year

Beckinsale deserves an Oscar nomination for this, no question. Too bad the film was criminally underseen, for now it will never happen.

Think again, there weren't too many great performances comes from actress in this year featured film, were there? My favorite performances of this year (so far) in ranking would be..

Actor;
1. Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
2. Richard Jenkins (The Visitor)
3. Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder)
4. Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges)
5. Andrew Garfield (Boy A)

Actress;
1. Inés Efron (XXY)
2. Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days)
3. Juliette Binoche (The Flight of the Red Balloon)
4. Kate Beckinsale (Snow Angels)
5. Belén Rueda (The Orphanage)

I dunno, I was pretty disappointed.

There's no denying its raw power and emotion and affect (I got seriously depressed by the end of the film), but I found that its manner of eliciting this was rather, well, plain. The great thing about DGG (for me, anyways) is his ability to take small-town events and actions and issues and make them feel larger-than life - the break-up in All the Real Girls is literally earth-shattering; the gold coins in Undertow are magical and mythical. And I just felt none of that in this film. It's probably the most straight-forward and un-abstract of any of Green's films so far, not counting Pineapple Express, because it's missing a bunch of the stuff I've come to love him for - most noticeably his wonderfully stylized-without-feeling-like-it's-stylized dialogue. As a result, the whole thing feels as straight as can be, with the themes and meanings pushed full-force to the surface, instead of remaining hidden underneath. And I just found it rather bland.

I mean, it's still a pretty good film, just by virtue of it being a DGG film, with all the stuff that comes along with it (save for what I mentioned). Beckinsale is indeed terrific. The camerawork is bleak and distant, much like the characters' lives. It's still a well-made movie, if not a terrible interesting one.

Meh.

I love this movie the more I think of it... I'd disagree with trix, I think it's very ripe for dissecting and finding meat under the surface. The whole thing comes off to me as a huge symbol for life and existence, in both a birth to death sense, and as representing the ultimate highs and lows of the emotional scale in life, from the gloriously romantic high moments to the black as death bottom. In a way the movie is kind of the ultimate tragedy because even though the narrative is mixed up, if you treat the 4 relationships as one arc of sorts, from the perfect young relationship as the "beginning", then the two middle ones as the fall, and Glen/Annie and death as the end, it's almost like taking a perfect pure person and then shading them blacker and blacker bit by bit until they are absolutely destroyed and become the total blackness of a soul we see at the end. I also love how DGG can enforce the emotion of the segments through the tone, from the glorious glorious romantic feeling of the Arthur/Lily bits, to the depression of the Glen/Annie, etc. That's probably what he can do better than any other director, is get emotion on screen, and in here he takes to the extreme, really more than almost any other movie I think SA takes the total pure essence of those two emotions and paints them on screen, along with others along the way (like shock, having your world's image broken, etc.)

Would I bet my house that he did all that intentionally? Dunno... but it makes sense to me.

I don't deny that there's a lot to dig your teeth into; my problem with it is that it doesn't bother to hide its deep thematic purpose - it's right out there in the open. I prefer films that obscure their meanings with archetypal or metaphorical stories - it's why I love Apocalypse Now and Night of the Hunter (and Undertow). But it's also why I dislike Wall-E and Crash and Juno - they're so fucking blunt. Snow Angels isn't nearly that bad (not at all), but I definitely felt there was some craft missing to it. It wasn't as deftly handled as Green's past works.

I dunno. I just felt off watching it last night. For whatever reason.

I dont like that the dvd for this movie has no features and includes both full and widescreen on the same disc. : ( (and its one of those lame, two sided ones so you cant even tell which side is widescreen :O)

Kate Beckinsale at her best so far by far, lots of shocking turns, very realistic character interactions, and a haunting conclusion. And I love Sam Rockwell.

A-

At my store it's not 2-sided. It's funny because there seem to be both version of WB movies. At my store we have both the flipper discs and the one-sided discs of BUCKET LIST and 10,000 B.C. Of FUNNY GAMES we have the 2-sided version, but when I rented it from Netflix it was the one-sided. Our store has the one-sided of P.S., I LOVE YOU but the version I bought at the store was 2-sided. And our SNOW ANGELS is one-sided.