Indies in the Cold: Sleepwalking/Snow Angels

I wouldn't call it a trend, but it seems that directors of independent pictures are drawn to cold climates. Earlier this year there was Frozen River, and just in the last few days I've caught up with two other small films set in bleak Northern winters. Each of these films deal with people who live on the margins and are almost always bundling up against unrelenting cold. There don't seem to be many indies set on Florida beaches. Maybe it's because they are usually shot in Canada for monetary reasons, or maybe it's just that directors like the look of snow as it blows across a desolate highway.

Sleepwalking got made no doubt because Charlize Theron co-produced and played the role of an irresponsible mother who dumps her pre-teen daughter with her slow-witted brother (Nick Stahl). He ends up taking the child to his father's ranch, which is a mistake because the father, Dennis Hopper, is a big old meanie.

Directed by William Maher (no, not Bill Maher, but that would have been interesting), almost every frame of Sleepwalking is bleak. None of these characters seem to have any hope. The child is played by AnnaSophia Robb, a very good actress who is going to grow up to be an astonishingly beautiful woman. And is there any beautiful actress who tries to deglamorize herself more than Theron? Here she plays the candidate for worst mother of the year, who takes up with the wrong kind of men and has a chip on her shoulder. She's a good actress, but she can take a role where she gets to dress up nice every now and then.

The film suffers from pretension, such as a supposedly meaningful scene when Robb dives into a swimming pool wearing roller skates. But mostly it's a series of moods in minor key, without signifying much.

Snow Angels is a little better, in that it's more ambitious in story. In a small town (don't know where, but it was filmed in Nova Scotia) there are two parallel stories going on: a young woman (Kate Beckinsale) recently separated from her emotionally unstable husband (Sam Rockwell) is having an affair with a co-worker's husband, and a high school boy deals with his parent's separation while getting close to a new girl in school.

Directed by David Gordon Green, who specializes in small films (I liked All the Real Girls), at least until he did Pineapple Express, does a nice job balancing the plot threads and giving us a sense of place. However, some of it is a bit obvious. We begin with a scene with a marching band director telling his charges that cooperation is key, a kind of blatant metaphor. Then we hear gunshots, and the rest of the film is in flashback, so we expect some kind of tragedy (going the Chekhov rule of showing a run a tick more--we don't see a gun but we hear shots).

Whenever I see films about crazed exes, I try to imagine the couple in question during happier days, and it's tough in this film. When we first see Rockwell we know he's buggy, and it's hard to imagine how Beckinsale married him in the first place (she says at one point he made her laugh, but he's certainly lost that talent). Also, the presence of their young daughter creates a tension that you just know won't come to a happy end, so it's just a matter of waiting for something to happen.

Much better is the rather sweet romance between the high school kids, Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby. It's mercifully free of some cliches--Angarano is in band, but he's not picked on and has friends. And though Thirlby, a fetching young woman, is put in some cat-eye glasses, I don't think she's supposed to be some kind of ugly duckling, she's just a new kid in school and unusual, so the relationship makes sense.

I'll continue to wait for that indie film set in Key West.