Beneath a blanket of snow
With his velvety baritone and his sour puss (you half expect him to leave a trail of lemon husks, sucked dry, in his wake), Alan Rickman is the ideal actor to play a very particular kind of brooder -- fierce but harmless, in pain but blessed with a high threshold for it. In Marc Evans’ “Snow Cake,” sensitively directed from a witty, personal screenplay by Angela Pell, Rickman plays Alex Hughes, a mysterious Englishman making his way across Canada having been recently released from prison, where he landed after killing someone. Whatever the circumstances of the crime, he doesn’t look like the type. Eventually it’s revealed that he’s not -- though he does seem to attract the kinds of repeat experiences that border on symbolism.
At a moose-themed roadside diner, somewhere in darkest Ontario, Alex is approached by a spunky teenager named Vivienne (Emily Hampshire). She talks him into giving her a lift home and he reluctantly agrees. Not long afterward, Vivienne is dead in an accident, and a guilt-stricken Alex, who was on his way to meet the mother of the son he never knew he had, feels compelled to pay a visit to Vivienne’s mother, Linda (Sigourney Weaver), who lives in an obsessively well-kept house in a tiny, remote town.
As Alex soon discovers, Linda is autistic; she’s capable of looking after herself but unable to process her daughter’s death emotionally. This causes some consternation among her neighbors, who doggedly insist that Linda react in the usual way to their rote condolences and giant bereavement cookies. But the only person Linda seems to want around is Alex, and his guilt compels him to stay until her elderly parents, who have gone on a wilderness hike, can be contacted.
“Snow Cake” unfolds over a few days, during which the autistic woman and the emotionally sealed-off man come to form an unlikely bond. Alex learns to adjust to Linda’s peculiar rules and gradually takes on a parental role for Vivienne posthumously. A more likely bond is soon formed between Alex and a mysterious neighbor, Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss), who lives next door. The three constitute a kind of holy triumvirate of affective unavailability -- one cultural (his “English reserve” is alluded to more than once), one clinical and one apparently cultivated. Mysterious as Alex remains throughout the movie -- other than having a wealthy brother who hates him, we end up knowing nothing about Alex’s life except for some momentous but oddly parenthetical events involving his surprise son -- it’s Maggie who turns out to be the hardest to fathom. Her isolation is willed and, it seems, slightly perverse. She refers to her romantic partners as “gentleman callers” and doesn’t feel the need to promote them to anything else.
Weaver is eerily affecting as a grown woman with the undeveloped affect of a small child, though in her own way she senses a kindred spirit in Alex from the start. She tells him that Vivienne, who had wanted to be a writer, had a habit of befriending the loneliest people she could find, because they had the best stories to tell. Alex’s story, though it’s eventually revealed in teased-out driblets, remains more or less shrouded in obscurity. But Rickman’s performance is nuanced and intriguing enough to make his character engaging and compelling.
Modest but well wrought and witty, “Snow Cake” is full of unexpected moments and clever observations and, despite a sparse quality, makes a good case for the idea that you’re never too late, or too far gone, to connect with or understand others.
“Snow Cake.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; One Colorado, 42 Miller Alley (inside plaza, Fair Oaks Avenue at Union Street), Pasadena, (626) 744-1224.