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Film review

A thriller's long and numbing wait for the winter

By Steve Persall
Published April 5, 2007

First Snow (R) (101 min.) - Guy Pearce plays against type and over the top as a twitchy traveling salesman trying to escape fate. Pearce plays Jimmy Starks, whose auto breakdown in a desert town leads to a pessimistic psychic reading and a movie that makes viewers wish fate operated more quickly.

Director/co-writer Mark Fergus essentially crams three Tales from the Darkside episodes into one movie, with Jimmy's plight as their tenuous link. First Snow begins with promise and a nicely dour turn by J.K. Simmons as the palm reader who endures Jimmy's condescending attitude. Simmons plays the role as a man beaten down by his psychic gift, yet vaguely enjoying delivery of bad news to such a lout.

So far, so good. Fergus creates a fine sense of everyday dread in the first 30 minutes, as Jimmy begins figuring out the seer's cryptic clues before the first snowfall, which is when he'll die. A montage of Jimmy noticing the ordinary things that should make anyone feel mortal is First Snow's cinematic peak, followed by ever-deepening valleys as the story careens into mediocrity.

Jimmy's self-centered personality could inspire several people to do him in: a sales partner who is canned and skulks outside his office, the investors in a Wurlitzer juke box scheme that Jimmy's ignoring while he chases leads, even the girlfriend (Piper Perabo) whom he treats poorly. These folks don't matter when Jimmy's mother (hammy Jackie Burroughs) and disturbed brother (Shea Whigham, wigging out) appear. Then they don't, either.

Fergus and co-writer Hawk Ostby (Children of Men) never find the proper note of metaphysical submission that Pearce nailed in Memento, making Jimmy's predicament feel more deserved than an antihero's should be. Simmons' long, absent stretches are filled with histrionics and aimless provocations; First Snow looks like an indie film and plays like a studio flop.

The film's utter lack of irony can't be described without revealing the ending. Suffice it to say that Jimmy doesn't create his fate (which could be intriguing) or learn much from it, except for sign-off, fortune cookie wisdom. D+

Steve Persall, Times film critic

Even when precious, Paris remains lovable

Avenue Montaigne (PG-13) (106 min.) - Avenue Montaigne is Grand Hotel transposed to a grand French thoroughfare. A number of charmingly neurotic Parisians cross paths with a fresh-faced new arrival, Jessica (Cecile de France), from the provinces. Advice is exchanged and lessons learned over cafe au lait and a baguette.

This is all a mite precious and will best be appreciated by those in the arts. Almost all the characters are - either overtly, like the classical pianist, TV actor and movie director portrayed, or peripherally, like the aging theater usher famous for massaging performers' feet. (Edith Piaf pronounced his fingers magical.)

Whenever their vain chattering starts to get annoying, a camera pans over the famous avenue - past elegant hotels and shops, a concert hall, the Comedie des Champs-Elysees and Hotel Plaza Athenee - and your mind wanders to the last time you saw Paris and how soon you can get back there.

There are worse things than movie as travelogue, and writer-director Daniele Thompson has a fine eye for the City of Light. But Thompson is up to something more ambitious; a comedy of manners combined with a riff on what the young can learn from the elderly, and sophisticates from rubes. That the film succeeds as well as it does despite a series of coincidences that strain credibility is a credit to a fine cast and a joie de vivre that pervades even the most implausible moments.

Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle

[Last modified April 4, 2007, 11:10:18]