SNOW ANGELS sss WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DAVID GORDON GREEN fROM A NOVEL BY STEWART O’NAN WITH KATE BECKINSALE, SAM ROCKWELL, MICHAEL ANGARANO, AMY SEDARIS, AND OLIVIA THIRLBY
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Nowhere is this more true than in George Washington, a loose-limbed tale that, in its simple humanity, erases the line between black and white, adult and child. In the DVD commentary Green explains that he wanted to establish “how the people communicate with each other and how they communicate with the land around them,” and there’s a strong sense of the characters as part of the landscape. He and cinematographer Tim Orr had a field day with the wild terrain of Winston-Salem, aptly described by Green as a combination of “industrial decay and natural beauty”: train yards overgrown with weeds, collapsing cinder block covered with brilliantly colored graffiti, mechanical cranes swinging clawfuls of garbage against a limitless blue sky. A father and son converse in a yard cluttered with sectioned tree trunks, and a boy declaims from the stage of a derelict school auditorium, a sapling growing out of the floor in front of him. The whole movie seems to take place in some strange, self-contained world.
Critics have described Green’s movies as southern gothic, and with Undertow the director seemed to be listening to them: the first half, with its family secrets buried under the kudzu, plays like a William Faulkner novel, and the second, in which two brothers flee their murderous uncle, is like The Night of the Hunter transplanted to the malevolent greenery of Deliverance. In all his movies Green tries to make the time period as vague as the location is precise, and that’s especially true here: aside from the rusty 70s-era cars and a punk-rock chick who materializes near the end, Undertow could be taking place in the ramshackle ruins of the Depression. Coproduced by Malick, it’s an impressive exercise in naturalistic cinema. But rewatching Green’s first three features consecutively, I was struck by how fresh George Washington and All the Real Girls still seemed, whereas Undertow felt naggingly derivative.
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