MOVIE REVIEW: 'First Snow'


From the Friday, April 6 Oregonian ...




It's weird to write this, but "First Snow" actually plays a bit like the sleazy flip-side version of "Stranger than Fiction." (Yes, the Will Ferrell comedy-drama.)

Both movies are modest tales about emotionally numb men with horrible jobs whose lives are shattered (and re-examined) when they learn, via supernatural means, that they're about to die.

In "Snow"'s case, the poor existential sap is flooring salesman Jimmy (Guy Pearce, looking so gaunt that his bare chest resembles nothing so much as the thorax of a freshly skinned turkey). Jimmy is a stringy-haired, smooth-talking dirtbag with an adorable new girlfriend (Piper Perabo) and a habit of selling out his business partners.

But then a roadside fortune-teller (J.K. Simmons) makes several surprisingly accurate predictions. He predicts the results of a basketball game. He predicts the source of a new business lead. And, oh yes, he predicts that an abrupt change in weather will signal the end of Jimmy's life.

Pearce takes a little while to settle into his character -- he lays on the smarm a little thick at first -- but once he figures out he really is done for, Jimmy is riveting in his descent. How will the end come? Via car crash? Via Jimmy's lazy heart valve? Via a rule-bending ex-employee (Rick Gonzalez)? Or, most likely, via Jimmy's boyhood pal Vincent (Shea Whigham), who's just out of the clink, high as a kite and bearing a very understandable grudge?

It's a funny idea, putting a salesman straight out of "Glengarry Glen Ross" into a supernatural existential conundrum. But what's unusual about "First Snow" is that co-writer/director Mark Fergus makes it clear (with all sorts of pointless misdirection) that the actual method of Jimmy's demise isn't really that important.

"Your fate lies on whatever road you choose to take," says Simmons during one of Jimmy's increasingly desperate visits. He urges Jimmy to regard the foreknowledge of his doom as a gift: "Think of those who never had a chance to put things in order."

If you approach "First Snow" as a straight thriller, it's not terribly satisfying; the twists in the story feel haphazard, and the thriller element is a bit droopy, even by indie-road-picture standards. But if you approach it as a meditation on the fact that we're all going to buy it, maybe tomorrow -- and that Jimmy's few days of trouble represent a universal lifetime of bad choices, bad health and bad luck crammed into a tight little time frame -- it gets a lot more interesting.

Oregonian movie reviews

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Posted: Fri - April 6, 2007 at 12:00 AM        

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