Small-town drama 'Snow Angels' is awash in a sea of gray

Two pops of a shotgun interrupt band practice in an opening scene of "Snow Angels," a melodrama set in a small Pennsylvania town where gray clouds always linger.

Everything, including human emotions, is covered by snow in this woebegone hellhole of lost folk.

"Snow Angels" is one of those movies that you keep hoping will get better. It is poetic and moody, rather than common and commercial, but once the mood is established we want more. We are kept at a distance, watching an impending disaster that we have no control over and, more importantly, no involvement in.

At least three stories of everyday folk are present, but hardly woven together. In centering on just three stories and putting the emphasis on one (a waitress and her alcoholic, seemingly "born again" ex-husband) the film is episodic.

Its director, David Gordon Green, is one to watch. He is truly an independent in his fondness for eccentric characters, but he's suffering from growing pains when it comes to storytelling.

Green has developed something of an underground cult for his ease with rural characters. A graduate of the North Carolina School of Performing Arts, his first film, "George Washington," was adored by the critics for the way it brought truth to a group of Carolina country teens. It got too little attention in theaters.

Kate Beckinsale, looking more beautiful than she should, plays a waitress at the Chinese restaurant. Mother of a small daughter, she's determined to rid herself of the alcoholic ex-husband (Sam Rockwell) who now wants to come back into her life. She's having an affair with the husband (Nicky Katt) of her best friend (Amy Sedaris), a fellow waitress. She's the character for whom we should pull, but there's no one to really admire in this film.

Beckinsale works hard and displays fine discipline in underplaying, but her movie-star beauty is much too exotic for such a working woman. Never for a minute do we feel she doesn't have both the looks and the intelligence to escape from this town. And her character, most of all, should be trapped if the tragedy is going to work.

Also miscast is Rockwell. He's a bit too smart for the bumpkin he plays. Rockwell is one of those actors who pops up once in a while in good roles but never seems to crash through to the mainstream.

Here, he plays a man who is on the brink of totally falling apart. He claims that he has "found Jesus" and is "saved," but his ex-wife and the audience know it doesn't mean much. When he learns his former wife, his sweetheart since high school, has been sleeping with one of his friends, it's too much for him. Rockwell makes him pitiable but, still, a bit stronger than he should be. The character must have a total breakdown. Total. Enough of the gray. We need defining colors.

More likable and a good deal more believable is the subplot of romance between two misfit teenagers. Michael Angarano is fine as the awkward restaurant worker who had a quite understandable crush on Beckinsale's character when she was his baby sitter. Now, he develops a liking for the eccentric, new, nerdy girl, played by Olivia Thirlby ("Juno").

Sedaris, as the frumpy side of the waitress duo, is one of the few members of the cast who seems to "get" the smalltown aura. Griffin Dunne is Angarano's college-prof father, a loser.

Everyone, in fact, is a loser waiting for disaster to hit. That shotgun we heard in the first scene does, indeed, pronounce what should be heartbreaking tragedy. The entire film is a prequel that leads up to it.

We wait, in vain, for this movie to become something like the wonderful "The Sweet Hereafter," a 1997 movie that is memorable for the way it illuminated how one tragic event affected an entire small town. With "Snow Angels" it is unfortunate that the tragic event occurs at the end. A better movie could be made about its aftereffects.

Although several of the characters are eccentric in absurd ways, the result could hardly be called a "dark comedy."

These people are sad, sad, sad - and so is their world. Most distressingly, there is not a character amongst them for whom we can really pull.

It is all dark and all hopeless.