Review of Snow Cake (2006) by Dean L — 21 Sep 2007

I watched it last night and was perplexed and I am intimate with the subject of autism.

I Love Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman is always amazing.

I spent the first part of the film trying to figure out if they were trying to have her portray someone living with autism or someone living with some other sort of mental challenge. Perhaps that was the point though ("When you've met one person with autism you have met one person with autism").

They packed a lot of different stuff in there that we have seen-Those people who just don't get it, those people that accept her as she is, those people who want to try and "fix" her, those people that think they get it because they have seen a movie or read one book...the list goes on.

I know that the film made me uneasy and worried.

I was not overly impressed with this as a movie.

The script was really skeleton. The character development was hardly there. We get no background on the characters save for a whisper here and there. We do not really get much as to Sigorney's upbringing and nothing about her early supports/diagnosis/treatment. It was pretty much a simple 2-hour PSA on what the writer/director believes autism to look like at that age and how a person should be accepted for what they are.

I had a bit of a problem as they portrayed a person who went to shiny objects as a ferret would to a glint of silver and the way that they portrayed her reaction regarding her daughter (I will not put a spoiler in here though this comes rather early).

Regardless of what you think of the portrayal of autism the movie was pretty much put together with shoestring and gum and could barely tread water for it. "Hey, let's write a movie about someone living with autism. This is what it would look like right? OK...now we need a story. Ah...slap this on...it'll pass. Now we have made a socially conscious film.".

There were some very loving scenes between Rickman and Weaver and also...Carrie-Anne Moss was great, but still...they felt hollow.

I did not buy the premise, because I did not buy the character, and because there was absolutely not a shred of meat to pick off that bone.

I appreciate what they tried to do here, but I feel they missed the mark.