BEFORE: Michael Fassbender carries over from "The Light Between Oceans", and it's clear that when I put this chain together, I was thinking a bit of the weather. I figured we'd probably have some snow on the ground by January 20, but no such luck - however, today in New York City was the coldest day in recent memory, with temperatures down in the single digits and the wind-chill factor on the negative side of zero. The heating system in our house can only do so much to combat our drafty upstairs windows, so the only thing to do is to put on three or four layers of clothing and hunker down with a movie and a hot beverage.
Yesterday was the big NFL Conference Championship Games, and even though the Patriots weren't playing in chilly Foxborough, MA, it looked like it was just as cold in Kansas City, so there you go. Let's hope things are a little less frigid in Atlanta in two weeks.
THE PLOT: Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose scarf is found around an ominous-looking snowman.
AFTER: Warning: Possible SPOILERS ahead, this is another film that's difficult to discuss without divulging some of the details.
From watching this film, I've determined that I've had a loose theme developing for the past week, though it was not intentional - it's something about difficult or non-existent relationships between fathers and children. In "The Beaver", much was made of the toy executive's inability to relate to his teen son or be a part of his life, and talking through a puppet didn't seem to help much. In "Red Sparrow", Domenika's father wasn't in the picture, so her uncle made her do espionage stuff to support her sick mother. And then there was "Mother!", and the less said about the father's indifference there toward his baby, and what happens to the baby, the better. In "Goodbye Christopher Robin", writer A.A. Milne was happy to let his son be raised by a nanny, and couldn't be bothered to interact with him until he had to, but hey, that led to a best-selling children's book series. And in "Peter Rabbit", Peter's father had been eaten by old Mr. McGregor, so the bunny children had to get by, and get revenge, on their own. And then of course in "The Light Between Oceans", the baby was found in a rowboat with a dead father, so it got raised by the lighthouse keeper and his wife.
All of which brings me to Harry Hole and the Snowman - who we meet at the start of that film, but not necessarily in that order. Harry is an older detective in Oslo known for breaking the tough cases, only he's got some personal issues, like his drinking, and the fact that he never married the mother of his son, Oleg. Now his ex-girlfriend has a new boyfriend, and he's struggling to be a part of his son's life - in fact Oleg keeps running away to try to find his "real" father, not realizing that it's probably Harry. Wow, there's a lot to unpack there, but these days, through one circumstance or another, divorce and blended families and single mothers and such, perhaps many people find themselves parenting someone else's kids, or watching someone else parent their own kids. Then there's the Snowman, who was raised by his mother and watched helplessly as his "uncle" came by infrequently to abuse his mother. It's no wonder the guy became a serial killer, after his mother drove their car out onto the half-frozen lake, seemingly choosing a watery grave over the living hell that her life had become.
At least, I think that's the origin of the Snowman. There's sort of a huge mistake here, where we see the background of the serial killer first, and then this is immediately followed by a scene with the adult Harry Hole. One might easily draw the conclusion that the child seen in the opening sequence grows up to become Harry, and that we've just fast-forwarded 30 or 40 years ahead in the life of the same character. A similar mistake was notably made in "Saving Private Ryan", where the whole middle of the movie was a flashback told from the point of view of Tom Hanks' character, and then it was revealed that the person having the flashback was the adult version of the Matt Damon character. What? How could one character have a flashback from another character's memories? That Steven Spielberg, what a hack.
So I was a bit confused at first, but I figured that the dysfunctional childhood we were shown was so effed-up that it was probably supposed to be the origin of the bad guy, not the good guy. They just needed a less abrupt transition there - in Harry's first scene he mentions that his uncle recently died, and the kid in the opening sequence had an "uncle", so you can see where I made my mental mistake, right? Anyway, Harry meets a new recruit in the Norwegian police force, a woman who studied his cases at the Academy, and since he's looking for a case to work on, she brings him the reports of a number of women who have gone missing, all single mothers, or married women who had recently gotten pregnant from affairs, and all had disappeared on days when it was snowing. As Harry correctly points out, "So what? This is Norway, it's always snowing." But Katrine is convinced that the snow is some kind of trigger, prompting Norway's first-ever serial killer to strike. If true, that's one giant case of Seasonal Affected Disorder right there.
Never one to follow the rules, Harry breaks into her files and finds a report about a similar disappearance of a woman 9 years ago in Bergen - and here's my old bugaboo about non-linear narratives, because the movie then jumps back nine years to show us THAT investigation, from the POV of Rasto, a detective in Bergen played by Val Kilmer (only you can barely recognize Val Kilmer these days, he looks nothing like he did back in the 1980's, or even the 1990's. For a while there he just looked very puffy, now he looks like he got a whole new face, like maybe one of Kurt Russell's hand-me-downs. Sorry, just keeping it real.). Anyway, things didn't end well for Rasto, so apparently he got too close to the case. Katrine, the new recruit has some definite ideas about who killed Rasto, but Harry finds out that she's got a personal involvement in the case, so she might easily be jumping to conclusions and seeing connections that just aren't there.
That's the difficult part of detective work, making sure that when you put the pieces of case together, that you do it in the right way, and let the evidence guide your conclusions, and not the other way around. And speaking of pieces, this is a killer who likes turning people into pieces, if you know what I mean. He's got some very weird cutting devices, and he's got a thing for putting people's heads on snowmen, and vice versa. Plus he builds a snowman outside every crime scene, but one looking AT the house, rather than away from it. Like many things about this movie, I wish they just took a little bit more time to explain the WHY of everything. I think there are a lot of dangling pieces here, and I'm not just talking about the body parts.
Is the Snowman like one of those Batman villains who can't resist leaving clues behind for his nemesis to follow, like The Riddler or Two-Face? There's also a fair amount of mis-direction here, but I suppose that's to be suspected in any murder mystery, we're led to believe it could be THIS person, but then later you realize they were really just setting up some kind of twist. Meanwhile, among all the hype over Oslo trying to land the "Winter Sports World Cup", whatever that is, there's some kind of prostitution ring going on, and a woman who cuts the heads off of chickens. All or none of these things could have some bearing on the case - I guess we're all just supposed to realize that Norway's got a lot going on, besides snow.
The director later said that he signed on for the film quite late, after Martin Scorsese declined to direct, that the production was very rushed, and then later in the editing process they realized that up to 15% of the screenplay was never filmed. With all that in mind, it's a wonder that there aren't plot-holes big enough to drive a Volvo through. I checked the plot-line for the original novel, and the movie is quite different in some places, especially with the fate of certain characters. I guess they didn't want to save them for future Harry Hole films, since it seems questionable that they'll film any more.
Also starring Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Rendition"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Val Kilmer (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Toby Jones (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), David Dencik (last seen in "War Horse"), Ronan Vibert (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "The Dinner"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Adrian Dunbar (last seen in "The Crying Game"), Peter Dalle, Jamie Clayton, Jakob Oftebro, Jonas Karlsson, Silvia Busuioc, Michael Yates, Alec Newman, Jeté Laurence, Roger Barclay (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn").
RATING: 5 out of 10 ring-tones
No comments:
Post a Comment