Heart-breaking sadness lingers long after end of ‘Snow Angels'

David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels” will break your heart. The layers of desolation in an upper-Midwest college town grow deeper and deeper in this adaptation of Stewart O'Nan's novel, and its sadness continues to resonate long after the film ends.

As the film opens, a high school band performing Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer” is interrupted by a nearby gunshot. Then, in flashback, we see the sorrow that led to that fateful moment.

And we meet Glenn (Sam Rockwell), a nice guy whose life fell apart due to his overweening insecurity and alcoholism. His wife and childhood sweetheart, Annie (Kate Beckinsale), left him and took their toddler, Tara (Gracie Hudson), and Annie is dead-set against making things easy for Glenn. Now awkwardly trying to stay on track, Glenn is reduced to uncomfortable weekly visits with Tara, and his furtive efforts to reconcile with Annie are doomed by her affair with a friend's slimy husband (Nicky Katt).

"Snow Angels” also tells the story of Arthur (Michael Angarano), a sweet but insecure teenager whom Annie once baby-sat and whose parents (played by Griffin Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette) just separated. Arthur is gentle but haunted. He drinks alone in his bedroom at night and struggles with his parents' breakup. But a new classmate, Lila (Olivia Thirlby of "Juno”), is attracted to this nice boy who makes her laugh, giving him a chance at happiness.

Still, any happiness in "Snow Angels” is fleeting at best. Glenn loses his grip and spirals in the face of an all-consuming tragedy, and Annie does not fare better. Arthur is drawn into it as his boyhood crush on Annie complicates his own role in the couple's uncommon disaster.

An underused actor with great subtle gifts, Rockwell rises to the occasion with his searing performance as Glenn. Green, a master of bittersweet small stories, is in top form, and Beckinsale reminds viewers that, long before she became a regular in big-budget vampire schlock, she was always a strong and emotive actress.

But the unstated subtext of "Snow Angels” rests in Angarano and Thirlby's capable hands. The story of Arthur and Lila might be more than merely intertwined with that of Glenn and Annie, which renders "Snow Angels” all the more sad.

— George Lang