fajrdrako | Snow Cake... (Reply)

Saw the movie Snow Cake this afternoon. It has the odd distinction of being the only movie I've ever seen set in Wawa, Ontario. I suspect it might be the only movie I ever will see set in Wawa, but who knows? I actually had to look at a map to remind myself where Wawa is. I had the right neck of the (literal) woods, though I'm not sure I could have placed it within 500 miles.

I wanted to watch it because Alan Rickman plays the lead role of Alex Hughes. Also because the other lead character, Linda Freeman (Sigourney Weaver), is autistic, and I am interested in autism, especially in seeing it depicted in movies and books.

The story: Alex Hughes is a quiet, introspective man, driving to Winnipeg on the trans-Canada highway when, at a truck-stop, he is approached by a voluble girl who badgers him into giving her a lift to Wawa. I was reminded of the scene in the first X-Men movie in which Rogue persuades Wolverine to let her hitch a ride with him - a scene which, coincidentally, I was watching on Friday because the kids in the Summer Drama Camp were watching it at lunchtime. As in X-Men, the car meets with an accident when a huge truck hits it. The car is totalled. Alex is just fine. The girl is killed.

So Alex goes to her home in Wawa to pay his condolences to her mother, Linda, before going on. But Linda is autistic, and it isn't the kind of conversation he expected. Stuggling with his own guilt and the baggage of his own past, Alex agrees to stay with Linda until after the funeral, and the story is about how the next few days unfold - his interaction with the people of Wawa, with Linda, and his feelings about himself.

So it's all psychological and social. Mostly a sad movie, but there were unexpected outbreaks of humour that made made me laugh out loud. Callum Keith Rennie gives a brilliant performance as the driver of the truck that killed Vivienne, and Cannie-Anne Moss is great as Linda's neighbour.

Though I enjoyed seeing it, I'm not sure the movie had much to say: glimpses of insight into other people's problems, grief and guilt and the difficulty in understanding high-functioning austistics. My favourite bit was probably a game of comic-book Scrabble played between Linda and Alex, where they make up the words and then make up usages for those words in terms of comic book stories. Linda obviously loved comic books, and loved Reed Richards - definitely raised her in my esteem.

Another treat: a cameo appearance from Susan Coyne and Mark McKinney from Slings and Arrows. (They played Anna and Richard.)

Alan Rickman takes so many high-powered roles (like in Die Hard and Harry Potter, I wondered why he took this role. Did something in the story interest him? Oddly, it seems to have been filmed not in the actual town of Wawa, but in Grosso Jackson, a place that seems to exist nowhere that Google can find except in references to this movie.

I never guessed that the title, Snow Cake, would have a literal meaning.