Snow Cake

Midway through Snow Cake, a neighbour of high-functioning autistic woman Linda Freeman (Sigourney Weaver) says: ‘I know all about autism. I’ve seen that movie.’ The reference, surely, is to Hollywood’s most famous dalliance with the condition, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man. Snow Cake, directed by Marc Evans from a first screenplay by Angela Pell, mocks such faith in cinema’s ability to ameliorate ignorance about complex medical conditions, but simultaneously strives to provide such a service itself. The film-makers attempt to have their cake and eat it.

Snow Cake begins amid the dazzle of white light streaming through a cabin window of the plane in which Englishman Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman) pensively watches the cloudscapes high over Canada. Journeying to meet the mother of a son he never met, who has been killed in a road accident, Alex’s lingering grief is limned in Rickman’s haggard features, his ebbing spirit externalised in the blanched northern skies and melting snow. In a schematic early twist, a truck crashes into his car, killing a young hitchhiking passenger, Vivienne, and Alex takes a detour to the small town of Wawa to console Vivienne’s mother, Linda.

Reminiscent of The Sweet Hereafter and Insomnia in its use of a wintry backdrop to its protagonist’s corrosive guilt, it more closely resembles Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, in which an embittered cop finds spiritual renewal in snowy upstate New York when he meets a blind woman whose simple faith restores his humanity. Vivienne’s mother offers similar salvation for Alex: he is by turns alarmed and amused by Linda’s childlike behaviour, neurotic preoccupations and apparent indifference to her daughter’s death. But, in a process neatly, though not always subtly, mirrored in the snow thawing around Wawa, Alex warms to Linda, seeing in her emotional forthrightness and euphoric outbursts an alternative to his own morose wallowing.

Weaver captures Linda’s polar modes of agitation and entrancement with striking verisimilitude. One scene in which she and Alex play ‘comic-book Scrabble’, taking turns to invent a word and then use it in an improvised sentence, is delightful. Weaver holds the viewer spellbound as Linda coins ‘dazlious’ to trump Alex’s lacklustre effort, and her spontaneous sentence is a liquid, spiralling flight of fancy that testifies to her extraordinary mental dexterity. But Weaver’s performance can seem too studied an impersonation, a work of mimicry that feels at times like a starry jaunt through an autistic tick list.

The film’s ploy is to make Alex seem at home in a strange town – he is quickly prized by Wawa’s community for his English accent and all but jumped upon by another of Linda’s neighbours, Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss) – but a stranger in Linda’s autistic world, where he has to fumble around for a binding logic. He makes a better job of the latter than some of the bit parts, who stand around citing familiar suppositions about autism or bemoaning Linda’s social etiquette (‘this is a wake!’ cries one lady at Vivienne’s funeral, aghast at Linda’s lack of solemnity). But the script falls foul of cliché itself, attributing an innate innocence to Linda that sentimentalises her condition. Teetering into whimsy when Linda imagines escaping the dreary funeral reception for a posthumous dance with Vivienne, Snow Cake ultimately collapses around its own soft centre.

This review features in the October 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.