Reviewed - Snow Cake: Sigourney Weaver's overly showy performance as an autistic mother detracts from the modest, atmospheric pleasures of Snow Cake, writes Donald Clarke
CINEMA tends to view autism as a source of automatic perception and uncanny talent. Indeed, if you gathered your information entirely from Hollywood, you could be forgiven for viewing the condition as some class of superpower.
Snow Cake, a surprisingly mellow venture from the director of such grim entertainments as My Little Eye and Resurrection Man, doesn't psychologically aggrandise its heroine in this fashion. Telling the story of a middle-aged autistic woman and her failure to acknowledge a sudden bereavement, the film appears to be making a serious attempt to responsibly represent her disorder.
Unfortunately, Sigourney Weaver, whose familiar urbanity leaks through once too often, fails to avoid the temptation to indulge in showy gestures and look-at-me grandstanding. Various bodies working on behalf of the autistic have granted her performance their imprimatur, so we must, I suppose, accept it as technically accurate. But rarely has acting looked quite so much like acting. Give Sigourney some shiny award quickly before she strains a muscle.
All that said, Snow Cake, filmed in frosty central Canada, remains a modestly appealing piece of work. The picture begins with Alan Rickman's troubled traveller, who has recently been released from prison, picking up an insistent hitchhiker at a roadside cafe. Minutes later his car is struck by a truck and the young woman is killed.
When he breaks the news to the victim's mother she seems oddly unperturbed. Over the next few weeks, the wanderer establishes a curious platonic relationship with the bereaved parent - she, of course, fails to connect with him emotionally - and a faltering sexual one with her cynical next-door neighbour (Carrie-Anne Moss).
Filmed in watery tones by Steve Cosens and featuring a winning score be the Canadian band Broken Social Scene, Snow Cake has a languid, deadened feel that nicely articulates the suppressed - or unrecognised - emotions that skirt its heroine's psyche. It is never particularly moving or markedly gripping, but its demands to be admired and respected are hard to resist.
