A Plea for Snow Angels and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Jesse Hassenger on one of the year's best, and another one worth not forgetting about.

Even in New York, small movies can get lost in the shuffle (or the indifference to spring movies due to March Madness, spring cleaning, the middle-class squeeze, the R.E.M. comeback, tension at home and abroad).  As the studios recharge from Oscar season and load up for summer, they and the smaller companies unload the indies that don't have much of a chance as awards contenders or summer alterna-blockbusters.  Movies sitting on my to-maybe-see list include Married Life, The Grand, Flawless, Chapter 27, Love Songs, and Sex and Death 101, and I can see from their dwindling showtimes that well-received spring fodder like Paranoid Park and Snow Angels aren't posting stellar numbers.  If they can't make it here… you know the rest.

Gus Van Sant is enough of an art-house brand that Paranoid Park doesn't need to make much money; I hope the same holds true for David Gordon Green and Snow Angels, because it wounds me to see this film fading so quickly.  It's easily the best American movie I've seen this year and I'd be shocked (though very pleased) if I see enough great movies to expel it from my ten-best list at year's end.

Green's first three movies were set in a distinct post-industrial version of the American South, dotted with junkyards and vacant lots.  Snow Angels, based on a recent novel, takes place in a somewhat less languorous Pennsylvania (never identified as such in the film, but anyway, there's snow and no Midwestern accents), and its characters have a greater age range than the main characters in George Washington, All the Real Girls, or Undertow, an underappreciated riff on Night of the Hunter (with far better child acting).  But the rhythms of Green's dialogue, even filtered through the adaptation process, are immediately recognizable, a lovely mix of the mundane, the inarticulate, and the idiosyncrasies of both.  

It's not self-conscious mumbling, though. The conversations between Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby), two flirting high-schoolers, have a playful awkwardness -- the way Lila semi-sarcastically describes the pencil Arthur hands her as "a wonderful gift" is oddly heartbreaking.  Later, Arthur dresses down his estranging father (Griffin Dunne) with passionate, mounting righteousness.

The Arthur/Lila story, even with the crumbling marriage of Arthur's parents in the background, comprises the lighter side of this movie.  Arthur's coworker (and former babysitter) Anne (Kate Beckinsale) stars in the other side, contending with her own busted marriage to Glen (Sam Rockwell): father of her young child, recovering alcoholic, attempted born-again Christian.  This material is more conventional -- note the characters who've made it, however tenuously, out of their late twenties -- but Rockwell, incapable of giving a bad performance, twitches electrically through Glen's desperation to reclaim his family, and Beckinsale doesn't let her natural knockout beauty (which, admittedly, is a little distracting at first) get in the way of Annie's less dangerous but equally vivid sadness.  She's perpetually just hanging on.

Green weaves these romantic relationships together with ease; the book-based script never feels condensed or abridged, unfolding more like a collection of linked short stories rather than the usual tragic march towards the inevitable.  Tragedy does come, but Green isn't a natural wallower; he seems too much to deny us humor and even a little joy, filling the void created by the film's bleakest moments. Jeanetta Arnette, playing Arthur's mother, emerges as the movie's embattled but rock-solid soul; in some ways, her story, halfway in the background, is the most quietly surprising. 

Still, I realized, after seeing the film and attempting to contextualize my breathless recommendation to friends and coworkers, that it's easy to make Snow Angels sound like a somber indie about regular miserable small-town lives.  Likewise, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day looks and sounds vaguely like the kind of mini-major art-house fluff that's tailor-made for senior citizens and/or Oscar voters.  But its off-season March release indicates not an also-ran costume picture like The Other Boleyn Girl, but something too tricky and genuinely retro for easy categorization.  It's striking to read review after review struggle with ways to describe this film as light or insubstantial (some choice Rotten Tomatoes nouns, IMDB-keyword style: "feather," "eye candy," "soufflé," "breeze," and most creatively, "hot buttery cinnamon scone") as if it were an elusive weather pattern. This may sound like quibbling, as most of these reviews are positive and do succeed in making Miss Pettigrew sound like a treat, which it is.  But its alleged light fluffy butteriness comes from mixing the decidedly un-cloudlike ingredients of "comedy" and "drama."

The film's screwball opening, in which down-on-her-luck Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is mistaken for a social secretary by dizzy, man-juggling actress Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams, who could probably do this kind of thing in her sleep but now, but hasn't yet), initially seems like something a hair or two less witty than it imagines -- plenty of speed and fizz, but few memorable lines.  This turns out to be an asset, though, as the sadness of these characters in a pre-WWII London seeps through the romantic farce. McDormand and Adams give us two hundred percent more strong female leads than most of this year's award pictures, and their sweet-and-sad duet is actually more fun than the qualified reviews would have you believe.

So go give your money to these movies (especially Snow Angels).  Support good movies before May.