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Snow Angels and Married Life: Wedded Blisters
Friday, Mar. 07, 2008 By RICHARD CORLISS
In movies, all happy couples are alike: they don't exist. The
cinematic notion of a contended man
and wife, gliding through life on a cloud of kisses, kind words
and double martinis, pretty much diedout with Nick and Nora Charles
60 years ago.Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the crime caper with Brad Pitt
and
Angelina Jolie, is about as close as you could come lately, and
they kept trying to kill each other.Maybe wedded happiness is
considered static, undramatic, a minuet of compromises. It could
also bethat depicting the satisfaction of people over 30 just
doesn't appeal to the audience demographic; the
young may think that anyone who's settled for living with
someone else is either miserable or
deserves to be. Whatever the reason, connubial bliss in pictures
doesn't hold a candle to connubialblisters. The only movie
marriages to hold our interest are the ones that are falling
apart.
That, anyway, is the conclusion to be drawn from two new indie
films opening today in NewYork and, a little later, around the
country. In the just-OK Married Life, a cheating husbandschemes to
be permanently rid of his longtime wife. Snow Angels, the one you
should trackdown, has nothing but unhappy marriages, some of them
slowly, painfully, disintegrating,
and one ready to blow up.To sketch the plot ofMarried Life is to
make the movie seem more provocative than it turns
out to be. Drab, middle-age Harry (Chris Cooper) confides to his
spiffy friend Richard
(Pierce Brosnan) that he's fallen in love with young, blond Kay
(Rachel McAdams). The
inconvenience is Harry's wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson); he still
cares for the old girl, and it
would kill her to see her hurt. So he'll have to kill her.
That's the recipe for a fine thriller, of
old or new fashion, and the attractive cast has their hooks in
you from Reel One.
The story, from John Bingham's novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven,
was first dramatized in
1962 for anAlfred Hitchcock Hourcalled "The Tender Poisoner,"
with Dan Dailey as the
husband, Jan Sterling as the wife and Howard Duff as the friend.
Here, in the script that
director Ira Sachs has written with Oren Moverman, the tale is
set in the late '40s prime
time for film noir, whose shadowy contours and sleek period
architecture the Sachs movie
mimes. Of late, noir has often been pretzeled into
post-modernism: by Joel and Ethan
Coen in The Man Who Wasn't There, by Todd Haynes in Far from
Heaven, by Robert
Rodriguez in Sin City. Each of these built on the viewer's
familiarity with the form to play
with and subvert it, to create a new, gnarled noir.MINOR SPOILER
ALERT: Married Life's twist on the genre is that there is no twist.
You
keep waiting for the irony to kick in, but the characters just
plod through the purgatory
they've created for themselves. More a case history than a
devious puzzle, the movie is like
a story overheard from the next restaurant booth: for all your
curiosity as to how it turns out,
you're not likely to have much personal investment in the
people. Actually, Married Life
doesn't suck. Its actors lend conviction to their roles, and the
film looks classy, like a visit to
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my favorite Greenwich Village Deco furniture store (Adelaide, on
West Tenth Street). But
the film doesn't soar either. Finally, it's only about as
interesting as...married life.
PEYTON PEAKSSnow Angels is built on the same yearnings and
desperation, the same threat of eventualviolence; but, happily, it
has an emotional density that trumps its familiarity. Winter
isapproaching in a small town where the high school band teacher (a
brief role played with
curt comic brio by Tom Noonan) shouts challenges at the
students: "Do you have asledgehammer in your heart? Are you ready
to be my sledgehammer?" The hammers ofhell beat in the hearts of
these frosty folk; forSnow Angels, like a bunch of other films set
incold climates (The Ice Storm, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, A
Simple Plan, Fargo, thisyear's Sundance winnerFrozen River), is
about people who will do anything to get warm,even if it means
getting burned. Cheating on their spouses, for a start; and for one
doomedfamily, a lot worse.Here's the town's topography of
restlessness. Annie (Kate Beckinsale) has split from herhusband
Glenn (Sam Rockwell) after a stormy marriage that spawned
four-year-old Tara(Grace Hudson) and a judge's ruling of Glenn's
spousal abuse. She works in a diner withBarb (Amy Sedaris) and is
having an affair with Barb's husband Nate (Nicky Katt). Also at
the diner is teenage Arthur (Michael Angarano), whose parents
have split and who has hada crush on Annie since she was his baby
sitter. Most of the denizens of this working-classtown are
searching to get or keep jobs most people would flee from making
themortgage or feeding the kids is for them as great a quest as
anything Frodo ever faced.That, and putting a down payment on a
little emotional security. A congenial body in amotel-room bed can
keep the chill away; a congenial heart may be too much to hope
for.Director David Gordon Green, whose script came from Stewart
O'Nan's novel, hasnavigated these slippery shoals before. Green's
George Washington, made in 2000, whenhe was just 25, plunged deep
into the inarticulate depths of preteen love; and his All theRight
Girls brought the same meticulous, poetic attention on college-age
kids. Snow
Angels, though seemingly broader and more conventional, has the
Green love of repeated
behavioral detail. We see a woman run her fingers through her
hair and, moments later, herson does the same; an estranged couple
faces each other, edgily she with her handsfolded, he with his
hands in his pockets. They've been together so long, and know
eachother so well, that even in anger their gestures rhyme.In fact,
they aren't so much people we see in movies as people we know. They
stare at theTV, pretending fascination with a game show as a way of
avoiding either a conversationthat's sure to turn prickly or a long
night of sullen introspection. They offer old doggerel like Eleanor
Roosevelt's "Yesterday is history, tomorrow's a mystery, today's a
gift. That'swhy they call it the present" as eternal wisdom. The
men in Snow Angels have theappetites of the philanderers they see
in movies but not the suave patter; a cheatinghusband in this town
is unprepared for the inevitable lies or evasions he'll need when
hiswife finds out. When confronted with his indiscretions, Nate can
only sputter, "Wh- whywould I do that?" or the even more pathetic
"Huh?" It's as if, in real life, the screenwritersare always on
strike.That's Green's gift: to show how people learn codes of
affection and aggression fromwatching movies, but when they try to
pull them off in crucial situations they come outawkward,
embarrassed and futile. The threat of domestic tragedy looms
overSnow Angels,suggesting some exotic blend ofPeyton Place and
Twin Peaks; but its triumph is inportraying folks who, no matter
how often they flail and fail, keep reaching out for
humanconnection.The film's success is due in large part to actors
who are both faithful to all the socialminutiae and seductive
enough to keep you watching. Rockwell mostly plays down the
