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A slice of life

A small Canadian/UK film that deserves being served
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 10th, 2007 issue

 

COURTESY PHOTO
In the winter of our disconnect. Rickman and Weaver in Snow Cake.
 
Snow Cake

Directed by Marc Evans
With Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie-Anne Moss and Emily Hampshire

A taciturn Englishman, washed up at a truck line diner in the wilds of Ontario, is approached by a punkish young woman who’s looking for a ride. Employing his native coldness, he tries to evict her from his table as politely as possible, though she’s rather, in her own way, persistent.
The man, Alex (Alan Rickman), oddly finds himself feeling kindly toward this kooky, inappropriate waif named Vivienne (Emily Hampshire), and agrees to give her a lift back to her hometown of Wawa.
A pleasant enough beginning, though one senses that we’re now in for the standard road trip saga, where just-met strangers will aid each other in making personal, perhaps even spiritual, discoveries about themselves. Yet as you settle in for what promises to be a formula film, something unexpected happens. Vivienne is killed.
Through no fault of his own, Alex feels guilt-ridden over Vivienne’s death, and goes on to Wawa to find Vivienne’s mother to help lend, however best he can, some solace, if not offer (that grimace-producing word) closure. However, he finds that Vivienne’s mother, Linda (Sigourney Weaver), is taking all the news in stride. She’s calmly accepted her daughter’s death, and has moved on to worrying about next week’s rubbish collection. Linda is a high-functioning autistic woman.
As easily as he was drawn into Vivienne’s world, Alex now finds himself entering Linda’s. Although extremely articulate and surprisingly astute, she is still incapable of attending to the necessities surrounding Vivienne’s funeral, something Alex decides to take on.
In this pathologically clean little tract house, in a town that sounds like a baby’s demand for water, a psychically damaged Englishman will become friends with a woman that possesses a unique way of seeing the world.
Linda’s extreme intelligence is married to a childlike fascination with bright lights, sparkling toys and snow. After an ample snowfall, she dashes to her backyard like a kid who’s just learned that school has been canceled. She lies on the ground making angels, while greedily eating handfuls of snow. At first Alex is puzzled by this behavior. “Have you ever had an orgasm, Alex?” Linda casually asks her guest. “It has been known,” a somewhat embarrassed Alex snaps. “It sounds like an inferior version of what I feel when I have a mouthful of snow,” Linda replies.
Welsh director Marc Evans has created something like a small miracle with Snow Cake. It has all the ingredients for a cloying tale of uplift, yet is spared ever becoming trite and obvious by its great humor and quiet humanity. In Linda’s version of Scrabble the object is to coin words, something that she is far more skilled at than Alex. One of her creations, “dazlious” (a nice hybrid of dazzling and delicious), becomes the perfect description for this overlooked Canadian/UK film.
The performances are equally excellent, particularly Weaver. It’s a tragedy that age remains a handicap for American actresses, primarily as they tend to reach the peak of their craft at the very moment that Hollywood flesh-peddlers are demanding new faces.
Weaver’s performance is extraordinary for its authenticity. There’s none of Dustin Hoffman’s studied earnestness found in the overrated Rain Man. Weaver’s “snow woman” is expertly played, hitting the delicate balance between childishness and wisdom to the point where it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two. “I know how you must be feeling,” Alex says sympathetically at one point. Wanting none of this physically impossible nonsense, Linda retorts, “You don’t know how I’m feeling because you’re not me.”
Rickman, like Richard Gere, has escaped the leading man trap and become a serious screen actor. Alex can be aloof and cutting, though never cruelly so. He’s obviously in pain, though Rickman never edges toward self-pity, that first refuge for second-rate actors.
As Maggie, Linda’s neighbor and the town’s Jezebel, Carrie-Anne Moss is terrific, matching Linda for clear-sightedness, though the two are far from friends. Moss, best known from the Matrix brand (and currently in Disturbia), has also cut out a strong career for herself in indie films. Snow Cake is her strongest work since Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
Evans overplays the ending with a voice-over from Linda, when a simple utterance from Alex would have achieved more. Nevertheless, Snow Cake is a slice filled with life and worth the time.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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