Snow Cake (Movie Review)
May. 15th, 2008 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hobgoblinnOh my. I just saw the most amazing movie. "Snow Cake," starring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver. What a beautiful, life-affirming story, with wonderful performances and a very unusual plot.
Here's a decent review.
And here's my take on it. (Spoilers, probably.)
Briefly, Alex Hughes, recently released from prison, picks up a young hitchhiker, Vivienne, a lovely, unconventional, free spirit who sees in him a man with a story, and a need. Just as they are settling into a kind of camaraderie, a car accident claims the girl's life. Though not his fault, Alex travels to the girl's home to offer his condolences to her mother, Linda. He finds there a high functioning autistic woman, now alone, and isolated as much by her condition as by her circumstances, and he somehow finds himself staying for a few days to help with arrangements.
I loved the parallels in this movie-- how Alex and Linda have both lost a child, how her unique way of relating to the world gives him something he needs to get past his loss and guilt, how he, in turn, gives her just the right mix of compassion and acceptance and honesty. He says to her that she's the first person he's ever met to whom he's not had to explain or justify himself, but really he's already done the same thing for her, and it may explain why she accepts him into her life for this short span of time.
But their relationship is not a romantic one. The romantic relationship is with a wise and compassionate neighbor (played by Carrie-Anne Moss), who like young Vivienne, sees Alex's loneliness and sadness and reaches out. Both relationships, romantic and friendship, were wonderfully portrayed, very idiosyncratically true to life, and confer healing and absolution of sorts on each of them.
The cinematography is quite moving too-- the use of light and shadow, the way Linda reacts to "sparklies" and the snow and water, the use of visual images and parallels throughout the movie to convey stillness, movement, relationships. So too is the use of music to give us some sense of the bright light of a girl cut off so tragically before her time.
I highly recommend this movie. I'm also struck again by how different Alan is in the different roles I've seen him play, and how good he is at conveying an emotional depth of reality with very small gestures. In this role, he does lost and bewildered very well, and touched. He is light years from his Snape, and seeing him in this much older role and then pictures of him from OotP (filmed about the same time) he looks years younger in the latter. It's odd, but with Buffy fanfic, I had so many more visual stimuli from the TV show and from other roles I'd seen especially Tony Head perform, and they helped me see how characters in my fics would look and react to things. It's not at all the case with Snape. I have some images from the movies I carry in my head, but I have many more from the books, and from various fanfics, and really his other roles don't have much to say to me for Snape. Maybe I'm growing a little bit, that the words of a scene are starting to come to have more resonance and reality for me than "seeing" the scene as an observer. Don't know what to make of that, but I toss it out for whatever it's worth.
I'm looking forward to the release of Bottle Shock with Alan later this year. Of course, I'm also looking forward to the new Indiana Jones movie next week.
Here's a decent review.
And here's my take on it. (Spoilers, probably.)
Briefly, Alex Hughes, recently released from prison, picks up a young hitchhiker, Vivienne, a lovely, unconventional, free spirit who sees in him a man with a story, and a need. Just as they are settling into a kind of camaraderie, a car accident claims the girl's life. Though not his fault, Alex travels to the girl's home to offer his condolences to her mother, Linda. He finds there a high functioning autistic woman, now alone, and isolated as much by her condition as by her circumstances, and he somehow finds himself staying for a few days to help with arrangements.
I loved the parallels in this movie-- how Alex and Linda have both lost a child, how her unique way of relating to the world gives him something he needs to get past his loss and guilt, how he, in turn, gives her just the right mix of compassion and acceptance and honesty. He says to her that she's the first person he's ever met to whom he's not had to explain or justify himself, but really he's already done the same thing for her, and it may explain why she accepts him into her life for this short span of time.
But their relationship is not a romantic one. The romantic relationship is with a wise and compassionate neighbor (played by Carrie-Anne Moss), who like young Vivienne, sees Alex's loneliness and sadness and reaches out. Both relationships, romantic and friendship, were wonderfully portrayed, very idiosyncratically true to life, and confer healing and absolution of sorts on each of them.
The cinematography is quite moving too-- the use of light and shadow, the way Linda reacts to "sparklies" and the snow and water, the use of visual images and parallels throughout the movie to convey stillness, movement, relationships. So too is the use of music to give us some sense of the bright light of a girl cut off so tragically before her time.
I highly recommend this movie. I'm also struck again by how different Alan is in the different roles I've seen him play, and how good he is at conveying an emotional depth of reality with very small gestures. In this role, he does lost and bewildered very well, and touched. He is light years from his Snape, and seeing him in this much older role and then pictures of him from OotP (filmed about the same time) he looks years younger in the latter. It's odd, but with Buffy fanfic, I had so many more visual stimuli from the TV show and from other roles I'd seen especially Tony Head perform, and they helped me see how characters in my fics would look and react to things. It's not at all the case with Snape. I have some images from the movies I carry in my head, but I have many more from the books, and from various fanfics, and really his other roles don't have much to say to me for Snape. Maybe I'm growing a little bit, that the words of a scene are starting to come to have more resonance and reality for me than "seeing" the scene as an observer. Don't know what to make of that, but I toss it out for whatever it's worth.
I'm looking forward to the release of Bottle Shock with Alan later this year. Of course, I'm also looking forward to the new Indiana Jones movie next week.
