Dir. Marc Evans, UK/Canada, 2005, 105 mins
Cast: Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Hampshire
Review by Will Davis
This film is a slow paced, nicely thought out drama that focuses on grief. Not a subject that tends to get potential viewers flocking to the screen, but also one rarely done with such a successful balance of humour and pathos.
The story is sweet and simple - and unsurprisingly enough involves death at an early stage. A miserable traveller, Alex (Rickman), arrives in Northern Ontario and is talked into giving a lively young hitchhiker Vivienne (Hampshire) a lift. When his car is hit by a truck, Vivienne is killed, and Alex, in a state of shock, decides to track down her mother in snowbound Wawa to offer his condolences. What he finds is Linda (Weaver), an autistic woman with a very different perception of death and a highly pragmatic attitude towards life. Over the course of his stay in Wawa, Alex bonds with Linda, as well as her next door neighbour Maggie (Moss), and is able to exorcise his own demons regarding the fate of his son.
The screenwriter of Snow Cake, Angela Pell, apparently listed Rickman as her ideal casting for the role of Alan, and indeed he seems so Rickman-esque it is difficult to imagine him played by any other actor. His phlegmatic expression, touched every so often with a flash of sardonic humour; his deadpan intonations; his world weary demeanour all are part and parcel of the Alan Rickman package we have come to expect. But Rickman, and Pell, are also brave enough not to sell the character short, curbing the many opportunities for one-liners and choosing instead to show as much as possible of his vulnerable side. All this goes to make Alan – sorry Alex - a solid and likable protagonist.
Yet Weaver’s Linda is so much more fascinating as a character that our interest in Alan and his story are soon in competition with our interest in her. For Linda is Pell’s truly ingenious creation, and as Alan’s narrative develops into an unlikely, and somewhat unnecessary love interest in the form of Trinity - sorry Moss – the question cannot help but be raised as to why she chose to make him the focal point. The film’s emotional crescendo comes at Linda’s cathartic dance with her dead daughter rather than Alan’s confession to Maggie of what he has been through before. In the end, Vivienne’s death and it’s effect on Linda is much more involving than Alan’s backstory because we have seen it, whereas his we only hear about. However, that said there is plenty of Linda, and it has to be noted that it is largely through her interactions with Alan that her character is able to come alive.
Meanwhile the cinematography of Snow Cake is a collage of colourful, beautifully framed shots, which seem almost to melt into one another. One can’t help wondering if a braver director might have cut some of the scenes, which linger on in certain cases, such as the funeral scene, to the point of mawkishness - even threatening to destroy our invested emotion in the tragedy. Fortunately it never quite reaches this fatal point of no return.
In spite of this, what makes Snow Cake a real achievement is the balance it is able to strike between sentimentality and stark cold fact. Once again, this is achieved mostly because of Linda, whose autism is on the one hand cute and childlike, but on the other, clinical and coldly inhumane. Her acceptance that her daughter is dead provides a neat counterpoint for Alan’s inability to accept the same truth about his son: her mode of living, which involves seeing as few people as possible, is contrasted with that of her neighbour, who cannot get enough of human warmth. But in a sense Linda finds her warmth in the snow, which she loves to the point of comparing its taste to orgasms: ultimately it is her unashamed veracity that gives Snow Cake its weight and power as a film.
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