The Importance of Being Earnest
a texan director strives for sincerity
Before last week, I was not the right writer to discuss David Gordon Green’s career or Snow Angels, his new film. My critical distance from Green was about as great as my critical distance from a favorite novel, or from my mom. For seven-and-a-half years of my life, Green was more than a talented young filmmaker—he was a kindred spirit, though I had never met him. He had seen what I had seen and heard what I had heard, and—with far more grace and care than I could ever muster—shared his observations in George Washington, his remarkable debut.
I first saw George Washington at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in the summer of 2000. The film had been rejected from Sundance but had won the Southeastern Media Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, which led to the museum’s high-profile screening. In the months and years that followed, the film screened at the New York and Toronto Film Festivals, landed on Roger Ebert’s Top 10 list of the year, and was canonized by the Criterion Collection—one of very few 21st-century films to receive the designation.
But this roaring acclaim was all in the future when I saw George Washington, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway. Green’s film, a languid, intimate portrait of a hot North Carolinian summer in a dying post-industrial town, seemed to capture the thing that I had most wanted captured on film—the south with which I was barely familiar, but whose poetic possibilities were unmistakable.
For the subsequent seven-and-a-half years, the film remained enthralling and flawless. I watched it many times, always struck by the warmth and genuineness of Green’s amateur child actors and the luminous stasis of the cinematography. After seeing Snow Angels, however, I watched George Washington for probably the 10th time, and it was suddenly clear that the earlier film’s conspicuous flaws were not merely a function of the script or the source material. Instead, I now saw that they had their genesis in a film that I had—up until now—considered beyond criticism.
For all of its hypnotic visuals, George Washington always seemed especially valuable for its humanity. Here was a film about children that was neither cute nor cloying, where kids were really kids. But after I took another look, the film no longer seemed unaffected. Indeed, I found myself struggling with much of the dialogue, which not only sounded a bit too clever, but also seemed to exist to be enjoyed with a kind of distanced amusement—“Look at these silly, smart kids talking about marriage and love.” Green’s sensitivity rescued the film from being actually patronizing, but the genuineness now seemed forced, if not contrived.
If George Washington featured moments that seemed awfully fortuitous, then Snow Angels is a catalog of convenient confrontations. Yet even as it falls prey to the clichés of overly depressing, American relationship dramas—an unfortunate but pervasive genre—it reveals a beautiful, sincere core that makes it compelling, even urgent. Adapted by Green from a novel by Stewart O’Nan, the film portrays three couples in various emotional states. Louise (Jeannetta Arnette) and Don (Griffin Dunne) are dealing with a difficult separation as their son Arthur (the fabulous Michael Angarano, who played young William Miller in Almost Famous) begins to spend quality time with Lila (the equally radiant Olivia Thirlby). In the main story line, the deeply religious and deeply troubled (the film suggests that the two are essentially corroboratory) Glenn attempts to win back the affections of Annie (Kate Beckinsale), whose own life is far from successful. Their young daughter’s life quickly becomes a metaphor for their familial struggle, with tragic and devastating results.
Though a disappointment, Snow Angels is by no means a failure. Even as Green restrains himself from the ambient, digressive images that gave his earlier films so much character, he expands the film’s domestic focus with quick, poignant glances at the town’s quiet streets and vivid shots of the high school marching band. Ultimately, however, the film cannot overcome the contrivance that George Washington generally avoided because Snow Angels is largely a document of clashes, fights, and general hysteria. The film features some curious stylistic choices—like the brilliant cinematographer Tim Orr’s sudden zooms—but the effect is distracting, rather than revealing. Green’s relationship with his lead actors falls prey to the same mistakes of over-calculation. Green’s incisive and empathetic direction is clearly an outgrowth of his facility with actors, and the performances in the film are multifaceted and subtle—an especially extraordinary feat for Rockwell and Beckinsale, mostly because each actor conveys far more depth than could possibly be accounted for by the schematic, jolting narrative.
Snow Angels does possess a thread of earnestness and sincerity: the blossoming relationship between Arthur and Lila. Their scenes are filled with the awkward verbal half-steps and physical evasions that define all human interaction but which seem especially characteristic of young, teenage love. At the very least, it rang very true to this critic—still an adolescent in many ways.
After George Washington, Green seemed to have paid more attention to the elements that it took me years to notice, because his subsequent film, 2003’s All the Real Girls, actually was pretty perfect. A deeply honest drama about two hesitant, inarticulate post-adolescents (played by Zooey Deschanel and Paul Schneider, who got his start in George Washington), the film was more plot-driven than Green’s debut, but managed to retain its organic structure and cinematography. In other words, it would have provided a perfect template for Snow Angels.
In short, watching Snow Angels and revisiting George Washington ultimately led me to rediscover the greatness that is All the Real Girls. Undertow, realeased in 2004, is a worthy film as well, and it’s Green’s most self-conscious and stylized work, but his filmography thus far hints at an interest in cinematic honesty, suggesting that George Washington, Real Girls, and Snow Angels can be viewed on a continuum. The casts have bigger names than they once did, and Green has certainly expanded his focus, but in All the Real Girls, the director attained an extraordinary level of sincerity without sacrificing the gifts that still make George Washington stunning.
But Green is nothing if not dynamic—his next film, Pineapple Express, which will be released in August, is nothing less than a Judd Apatow stoner comedy. He is also only 32 years old, which suggests that the next seven-and-a-half years could provide me with much more fodder for reassessment. I’m looking forward to it.