OK film fans I'm still feeling rundown on this blah Monday. A few nights back I had a little Will Ferrell post where I mentioned tonight's film. Since I had been thinking about ever since I decided to give it another viewing and see what I thought of it now, a few years since my last viewing.
Winter Passing is a solemn, quite Independent Film that tries, almost too earnestly, to deliver the poignancy found in lives filled with lonely desperation. Reese Holden (yep, it's Zooey Deschanel again in another low key but wonderful performance) lives in NYC and is a struggling actress working occasionally in small plays and as a bartender. She smokes, drinks, sleeps around and occasionally, when her depression becomes too much, she slams her hand in a drawer. She's approached by a literary agent looking to score a coup and publish letters written between Reese's father Don Holden (Ed Harris), a famous novelist and now drunken recluse, and her mother, a recently deceased famous novelist. Despite the sizable sum offered to procure the letters Reese is hesitant to return to her childhood home, something she hasn't done since she left, not even for her mother's funeral. But she needs the money and we soon discover she doesn't really have anything holding her down in the city.
When she finally makes the trip she is met at the front door by Corbit (Will Ferrell), her father's handyman/protector with a strange history as a guitarist for a Christian rock band. Before he will let her in he asks her for some ID. Corbit lives in the house along with Shelly, a former student of Don's when he was teaching in the University of Iowa's acclaimed Writers Workshop (go Iowa!). They seem a rather odd collection until Reese spends some time in the house and realizes that a small surrogate family has been formed as each hides from the world for their own personal reasons. They tend to Don as he struggles to write, crippled by the lost of his wife and attempting to drink his depression away. Of the cast listed here it is Ferrell who surprises by creating a believable character, peculiar, shy and encapsulated in deep set fears
Reese's arrival creates a disturbance of the dynamic in the house. She is still angry with her father over her stilted childhood and the time spent being ignored in a house of two creative geniuses. But eventually the confrontations seem to awake everyone in the house, creating a new dynamic and changing the directions of everyone in the house. This is not a feel good Hollywood happy ending kind of film. Writer/Director Adam Rapp has only made a few films and is better known as a playwright, a feeling you get in the intimate scenes that build on emotional realism.
Ultimately, once we get past the requisite indie pain and suffering, this is a film about hope and perseverance in the face of depression brought on by unmet expectations and the accompanying sense of hopelessness. You cannot be made whole from the losses you accumulate in life, but this film tries to capture the struggle to overcome them and make it through the day with a desire to see tomorrow. The pace and tone of the film reminds me of a few other favorites, films like Love Song for Bobby Long and Wonder Boys. If you look up the film on Rottentomatoes.com you'll see it has a rather low approval rating, but as usual, the one critic I value the most nailed down not only the film, but why most people overlook a film like this.
In the words of my Guru, Roger Ebert, you get the essence of the film and a little lesson as well. "This is the kind of movie routinely dismissed as too slow and quiet by those who don't know it is more exciting to listen than to hear. It is sure to disappoint those attracted by the promise of a Will Ferrell comedy -- disappoint, puzzle, maybe enrage. What you hope for are those Ferrell fans who are open to a new kind of film they may not have seen before. That's how you grow as a filmgoer; your favorite stars lead you by the hand into deeper waters."
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