‘YOU notice people don’t bring out cameras on sad days,” says the teen at the center of “Snow Angels.” Exception: indie film directors. It’s the happy days that make them lock up the equipment.
David Gordon Green’s “Snow Angels,” based on a Stewart O’Nan novel, is funny, beautifully written, nicely observed, sweetly familiar. For the first half.
The hookups and breakups of teens and adults in a middle-class northern suburb make for a refreshingly unschematic structure. A waitress at a Chinese restaurant (the excellent Kate Beckinsale, whose return to indieland is welcome) and her awkward but decent estranged husband (Sam Rockwell, who is superb) are trying to do their best for their young daughter while he tries to get over his drinking and she has a joyless affair with a married man. A guy she used to baby-sit, who is now in the high school band, is striking up a shy romance with an artsy new girl in town, as he too easily shrugs off the departure of his professor father (Griffin Dunne), whose wife throws him out of the house as the film starts.
The general floundering is realized with subtle wit and depth of feeling by all, especially by the tremendously appealing Michael Angarano, who quietly owns the film as the teen boy. In a year or two he could be as big as Shia LaBoeuf or Michael Cera. Strangely funny dialogue makes the characters shine, as if we’re in an Alexander Payne film minus the snark. “I like your shoes,” one student says to another. The reply: “What’s wrong with them?” A band coach exhorting his cranberry-clad players exhorts them to play “Sledgehammer” better: “You have to have a sledgehammer in your heart!”
But O’Nan doesn’t seem to trust that his characters are interesting enough without doing much, so he throws them into some increasingly hellish situations.
Despite some foreshadowing in the opening scene, the film’s change of key in the second half feels like a betrayal. Layered characters become billboards for trite ideas. When somebody starts talking about Jesus Christ as his savior, you know you’re in for a dire time of it.
SNOW ANGELS
Everyday people.
Running time: 106 minutes.Rated R (profanity, sexual situations, drug use, violence) At the Lincoln Plaza and the Sunshine.