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Monday, October 30, 2017

MOVIE REVIEW/The Snowman
Men Are Ice Cold Men, And This Film Melts Fast

A scene from Tomas Alfredson's drama "The Snowman", based on Jo Nesbo's novel.  Universal Pictures
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Monday, October 30, 2017
Everybody is either drunk, sleeping, dead or lying on the floor in "The Snowman".  There are joyless expressions on many people's faces and there are severed heads.  Is this what living in Oslo does to people?  (I've yet to visit.)  Norwegian native Tomas Alfredson ("Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") directs this clunky chronicle of brutality, debauchery and dismemberment.  Michael Fassbender, who often plays dour characters as masters of misery ("Hunger"), despair ("Shame") or malevolence ("12 Years A Slave"), staggers through this insipid crime thriller as a detective trying to solve serial murders in Norway's capital city. 

Based on Jo Nesbo's same-titled novel "The Snowman" tosses red herrings out to try and sustain a film that drags for two hours.  A detective named Harry Hole (Mr. Fassbender) receives taunts in letters with handwriting reminiscent of the Zodiac killer (has he been hiding out in Europe all this time?)  Oddly for a detective Harry's knack for remembering is poor.  "I'm a drunk," he declares.  If only Columbo, who tricked assailants into thinking he had lapses of memory, could afford to be so cavalier.

As in other films Mr. Fassbender is an artful vision of still life in "The Snowman", adorning its solemn, washed-out atmosphere like a moody, pensive fashion model.  He is this muddled landscape's only fitting piece.  Generally the sightseeing in snowy Oslo consists of angry, flamboyant, lecherous or sociopathic men -- and hacked-off body parts as trinkets for display and gawk.  Cinematographer Dion Beebe's cameras are the lone tourists.

No man in this film is a father.  Male responsibility of any kind is vacant.  Harry is a member of this non-father/fatherless club, one which may fuel these graphic ritualistic killings.  Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has a son who is part of the estranged 21st century family Harry once lived with.  Their relationship, and Harry's relationship with anyone in "The Snowman" is tentative.  Rakel now lives with a squeaky clean upper-crust doctor (James D'Arcy) who doles out prescription medication like candy well before Halloween or Christmas.

As characters fall silent "The Snowman" slumps to the finish line, plausibility melting away by the second.  With each new dead body revealed as a no-head or an ice-head the drip, drip, drip is your precious time oozing away.  Snowmen pop up like trolls around the edges of the frame.  I kept waiting for the twigs in their torsos to applaud their own existence.  You could be tempted to laugh out loud at all of this but "The Snowman" takes itself so seriously.  I felt like a frost-bitten prisoner watching Mr. Alfredson's depressing dead-ender. 

It's a shame the director couldn't deliver given a stellar cast that includes J.K. Simmons as a local billionaire businessman who isn't discreet with women.  Women in "The Snowman" are so terribly static, attacked throughout its entireity.  To say that the women are devoid of agency -- see detectives like Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) who discovers what independence from male protocol gets her -- is beyond an understatement.

Neither Mr. Alfredson nor the cast of good actors can elevate this gloomy mess.  The script is the primary culprit.  Its characters are disparate threads of emptiness, functionaries on a chessboard without squares to move to.  The script written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Hossein Amini and Peter Straughan needed more work.  The trio's handiwork barely survives the ice-covered river this dull blade of a film skates on.  Perhaps the killer who wrote the taunting notes to Harry should have taken a stab at a rewrite.


Also with: Val Kilmer, Chloe Sevigny, Jamie Clayton, Anne Reid, Irina Kara.

"The Snowman" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for grisly images, violence, some language, sexuality and brief nudity.  The film's running time is two hours.
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