Chris Knipp
04-09-2007, 12:34 PM
Mark Fergus: First Snow (2006)
Sunlight, shadow, and sleaze
Review by Chris Knipp
First Snow is the directorial debut of Mark Fergus, who co-wrote it with his writing partner of twelve years, Hawk Ostby (they met at Boston Univeristy, and were first inspired by Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men); they also wrote Children of Men (for which they got an Oscar nomination) and Jon Favreau's Marvel comic book adaptation, Iron Man, coming out next year, with Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges; and an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, a Paramount project. First Snow got a shot in the arm when producer Bob Yari came on board.
But you don't know who Fergus is and you sort of want it that way with a movie like this. You wander into it recognizing only the raw bony face of Guy Pearce. Pearce, as Jimmy, comes on dressed in cheap suits driving a sleazy car as a salesman in New Mexico with a pretty young girlfriend, Dierdre (Piper Perabo), and there's another salesman, Ed (William Fichtner) who's his friend. The plot has ramifications the sketchy dialog gives hints of. Jimmy wants to sell classic Wurlitzer jukeboxes equipped with their original 45's but his card shows he still sells flooring.
This movie is like a cheap salesman itself and that’s its charm. It's professional but not slick, raw like Pearce's skinny face. Its contents are the stuff of B-movies -- grudges, double-crosses, threatening phone calls and, the centerpiece, a grizzled trailer park fortune teller (the excellent J.K. Simmons) who sees something unexpected in Jimmy's future too terrible to relate. A gritty past comes back to haunt him as he drives around on the highway fleeing winter. "You're safe until the first snow," the seer mumbles, before he gives Jimmy his money back and clams up. But whatever road you take, the same fate follows you. Ouch.
There was a scam in Mexico, something about money laundering and a partner named Vince (Shea Wigham) who did time and now is out and mad.
First Snow is largely made of close-ups, harsh bright desert light and heavy shadow. It's a nice grungy riff on noir photography with handheld camera and seedy locations instead of studio shots and fancy lighting. And instead of intrusive Angelo Badalamenti or Bernard Hermann-style background sounds it's nicely highlighted by Cliff Martinez, who did the underscored music for Traffic and Narc.
Albuquerque, NM is the setting. Fergus was living there and the snow there had dazzled him. He must have also felt the nexus of urban poor and desert as ideal for a story about a two-bit shyster running from a terrible fate.
Guy Pearce has long lanky hair as he did in John Hilcoat's The Proposition, and it makes him look sleazy even as his fine cheekbones and chiseled torso make him sexy. He grins a lot, till he starts sweating, and looking desperate, and hiding in motel rooms from a nemesis he seems to have imagined. A coworker he fired named Andy (Rick Gonzalez) scares him. He's on the run after he visits Vince's grizzled, dying mother (Jackie Burroughs) and thinks Vince is crazy and tailing him. When he's holed up in a dark motel room things get pretty tense.
Then at some point Jimmy washes up and shaves and stops running; some of the tension disperses and this is where writing and editing fail to come together. Jimmy goes out in the snow. It was just superstition. Wasn't it? He relaxes and smiles again and goes home. He tells Ed over their usual drink that he's in the center of the tornado where it's calm, but the energy goes out of the picture for a while, till Jimmy, with questionable motivation after being on the run, goes to meet Vince (who's left him a zillion phone messages: the movie is plagued by cell phones and land lines). And the tension, anyway, is back.
First snow has a double ending whose second half almost seems a quick afterthought and the whole story falls apart like a house of cards. What was it all about, anyway? Why, it was about the light and the shadows and the romance and sleaze and scariness of cheap suits and cheap cars and the threadbare plots of little movies like this that can still take you off somewhere and keep you watching and hanging on every word in spite of yourself.
Sunlight, shadow, and sleaze
Review by Chris Knipp
First Snow is the directorial debut of Mark Fergus, who co-wrote it with his writing partner of twelve years, Hawk Ostby (they met at Boston Univeristy, and were first inspired by Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men); they also wrote Children of Men (for which they got an Oscar nomination) and Jon Favreau's Marvel comic book adaptation, Iron Man, coming out next year, with Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges; and an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, a Paramount project. First Snow got a shot in the arm when producer Bob Yari came on board.
But you don't know who Fergus is and you sort of want it that way with a movie like this. You wander into it recognizing only the raw bony face of Guy Pearce. Pearce, as Jimmy, comes on dressed in cheap suits driving a sleazy car as a salesman in New Mexico with a pretty young girlfriend, Dierdre (Piper Perabo), and there's another salesman, Ed (William Fichtner) who's his friend. The plot has ramifications the sketchy dialog gives hints of. Jimmy wants to sell classic Wurlitzer jukeboxes equipped with their original 45's but his card shows he still sells flooring.
This movie is like a cheap salesman itself and that’s its charm. It's professional but not slick, raw like Pearce's skinny face. Its contents are the stuff of B-movies -- grudges, double-crosses, threatening phone calls and, the centerpiece, a grizzled trailer park fortune teller (the excellent J.K. Simmons) who sees something unexpected in Jimmy's future too terrible to relate. A gritty past comes back to haunt him as he drives around on the highway fleeing winter. "You're safe until the first snow," the seer mumbles, before he gives Jimmy his money back and clams up. But whatever road you take, the same fate follows you. Ouch.
There was a scam in Mexico, something about money laundering and a partner named Vince (Shea Wigham) who did time and now is out and mad.
First Snow is largely made of close-ups, harsh bright desert light and heavy shadow. It's a nice grungy riff on noir photography with handheld camera and seedy locations instead of studio shots and fancy lighting. And instead of intrusive Angelo Badalamenti or Bernard Hermann-style background sounds it's nicely highlighted by Cliff Martinez, who did the underscored music for Traffic and Narc.
Albuquerque, NM is the setting. Fergus was living there and the snow there had dazzled him. He must have also felt the nexus of urban poor and desert as ideal for a story about a two-bit shyster running from a terrible fate.
Guy Pearce has long lanky hair as he did in John Hilcoat's The Proposition, and it makes him look sleazy even as his fine cheekbones and chiseled torso make him sexy. He grins a lot, till he starts sweating, and looking desperate, and hiding in motel rooms from a nemesis he seems to have imagined. A coworker he fired named Andy (Rick Gonzalez) scares him. He's on the run after he visits Vince's grizzled, dying mother (Jackie Burroughs) and thinks Vince is crazy and tailing him. When he's holed up in a dark motel room things get pretty tense.
Then at some point Jimmy washes up and shaves and stops running; some of the tension disperses and this is where writing and editing fail to come together. Jimmy goes out in the snow. It was just superstition. Wasn't it? He relaxes and smiles again and goes home. He tells Ed over their usual drink that he's in the center of the tornado where it's calm, but the energy goes out of the picture for a while, till Jimmy, with questionable motivation after being on the run, goes to meet Vince (who's left him a zillion phone messages: the movie is plagued by cell phones and land lines). And the tension, anyway, is back.
First snow has a double ending whose second half almost seems a quick afterthought and the whole story falls apart like a house of cards. What was it all about, anyway? Why, it was about the light and the shadows and the romance and sleaze and scariness of cheap suits and cheap cars and the threadbare plots of little movies like this that can still take you off somewhere and keep you watching and hanging on every word in spite of yourself.