So cold and blustery this February day, with winds here in Ohio to compete with the gales that chill my family to the bone in Southwest Kansas. A fitting movie for such a day, Winter Passing (2006). I wasn’t sure I would like it as it opened on the central character, Reese Holden (played by Zooey Deschanel, an actor who looks and sounds like Debra Winger), because the focus seemed to be on her self-involvement. I am not impressed by that film genre that presents self-involvement favorably, as in the film with “Eternal Sunshine” and “Spotless Mind” in the title. I couldn’t finish that one, even though I typically like the acting of Jim Carrey and thought Kate Winslet did a fine job in Sense and Sensibility.
But to its credit Winter Passing did not glorify characters with arrested emotional development. In the storyline the self-involvement of Reese was presented in a studied manner . . . as was the self-involvement of her father, Don Holden, a character played very sensitively by Ed Harris. Instead of glorifying self-involvement or depicting it as a mere quirk of personality, these two characters were presented as deeply pained in part by that very state. Their excesses of “self focus” kept these characters from understanding and supporting each other. They were isolated from each other, unable to discuss the suicide of the wife (to Don)/mother (to Reese), unable to comfort one another. Reese was trapped in an angry state of arrested emotional development, her father caught in an alcoholic haze. His grief and guilt over his wife’s suicide was turned inward as he drank his way through each day. Reese’s anger turned both outward—toward her father and the two people who lived with him and functioned as his caretakers—and inward as she snorted cocaine to numb the pain.
Besides the film exposing the self destructive qualities of self-involvement, it set this state in the context of the “artist’s life,” for all three members of the Holden family (the dead mother, Mary, and Don and Reese) are some type of artist. Don and Mary fiction writers, Reese an actor in NYC. The relationship between creativity and madness is explored, especially in scenes with Don and one of his caretaker friends, played by Will Ferrell, hitting golf balls around in a cleared-out bedroom of the Holden house. Don and the Will Ferrell character, Corbit, are outfitted in “body armor” of sorts: the chest and leg padding of an ice hockey goalie and a makeshift “shield” from the lid of a forty-gallon metal trash can. They wield drivers with full force in the room, adding an element of the surreal to an otherwise realist film. The madness, or surreality, are heightened by Don’s choice to move to a new bedroom. He has moved out of the house altogether, leaving the care of it to Corbit and another character, Shelly, played by Amelia Warner. Don is ensconced in his very run-down garage, and all the furniture from his and his wife’s bedroom is situated in the back yard, open to the winter wind and snow. His ramshackle garage and the bedroom furniture in the yard seem expressionistic, revealing the decay of Don’s mental faculties and his inability to face his grief and guilt.
But the surreality is not presented as a mere quirk. It is totally in keeping with a psychologically realist exploration of the artist’s way of coping with the sudden, traumatic loss of a loved one. The realist confluence of artistic temperament, trauma and grief, self-involved guilt, and a writerly interest in every idea ever written about extends to the depiction of the Holden house, for its rooms and hallways are stacked high with books of all sorts. It is the house of people who treasure books and the words and ideas they contain, who can’t throw anything away, who make their very lives out of words.
That theme of being compelled to live in words, especially words of the past, is evidenced by the old books that Don surrounds himself with but also by the collection of love letters that his wife and he exchanged. The collection is the only organized thing in the house, having been paper clipped into sequential sets by Mary some time before she committed suicide. Mary has left the collection to her daughter, and the film’s plot opens as Reese is approached by an editor who wants to publish these very private, very candid letters. Reese’s intention is to go to her parents’ home in the Upper Peninsula, get the letters, and turn them over to the editor for a sizeable sum of money.
Of course she comes to treasure the letters as she reads her parents’ correspondence. And as she comes to understand the complexity of her parents’ relationship, she also begins to work through the grief over her mother’s death. Looking over the plot, I recognize that it is not groundbreaking. The strength of the film comes from its well-developed symbology: scenes of digging up and burying packages of “words,” the Corbit character unable to play his guitar and sing at the same time, the Shelly character remembering Mary’s letters verbatim and caught up in the dead woman’s existence, Reese rummaging through her mother’s dresser drawers for her father’s necktie, the tie used in the suicide.
The strength of the film also comes from the subtlety of the actors. Ed Harris always develops interesting, believable, compelling characters. His range of characters is amazing. And two of the other three matched his performance with their own subtlety of depiction. Zooey Deschanel and Amelia Warner both underplayed their emotional turmoil but it was evident at moments in the face and shoulders. And Will Ferrell, who is better known for comedic roles, decently played a troubled musician, using that flat-affect technique that often works for someone unskilled in subtlety of expression.
The settings of closed-in cluttered rooms of the Holden house are contrasted with the house and outbuildings set in an isolated and fairly open area of the Michigan UP. This exposed rural setting was further contrasted with the closed-in, cluttered New York City apartment rooms, bars, and streets. This textural contrast I liked very much. I don’t know the writer/director, Adam Rapp. I’ll have to see what else he has written, directed.
