THE STORY – Lester and his son Mike began a search for their vanished matriarch across the rugged landscape of the American Rocky Mountains in the 1950s, while Mike sorts out his own emotional center.
THE CAST – Fred Hechinger, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Caitríona Balfe, Kit Connor & D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai
THE TEAM – Andrew Haigh (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
Writer and director Andrew Haigh (“45 Years,” “All of Us Strangers”) returns to the film festival circuit with “A Long Winter,” his ambitious adaption of Colm Toibin’s 2006 short story. The film, which just had its World Premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, where Haigh received the prestigious Silver Medallion award, is a beautiful exploration of some of the themes from Haigh’s past work – loneliness, sexuality – but never reaches the emotional heights of its far more satisfying predecessors.
“A Long Winter” is set sometime in the early 1950s, during the Korean War. The protagonist is Mike, portrayed by a moving Fred Hechinger, who lives with his younger brother Tommy (Kit Connor) and his father Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and his mother Louisa. The four of them live mostly in seclusion, far atop the Rocky Mountains somewhere in Central Colorado. As the long winter approaches, Tommy is headed off to war and Mike’s mother is slowly slipping away as well, haunted by fundamental unhappiness at the fundamentals of her life.
Lonely men with absent mothers or fathers are nothing new in Haigh’s work, though the mother in this film is not lost to an accident but to the very fact of motherhood. Soon, Mike’s mother slips back into an old drinking habit, and her general discontent with her life is palpable. Mike’s Uncle Frank (Martin Freeman) later shows up, and explains that Mike’s mother had begged his father on hands and knees to take her away from her seclusion. Lester, for his part, comes from the big city but has vowed never to return. His quiet cruelty, including against his song, is of the era, and always bubbles right up against the surface. Soon, Mike’s mother has no choice but to escape, simply walking out of her home just as the winter is about to hit.
Over the next few hours and months, Mike is involved in a frantic and then quieter but persistent search for his absent mother, understanding to expect the worst but still hoping for some form of redemption. At the same time, his hidden sexuality also rises slowly to the forefront, including in his infatuation with an attractive young police officer (Anthony Timpano) who aids in search of his mother and, later, in a young man sent along to help with the house chores now that there is no female figure in the household (an underused D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai).
As the winter and cold deepen, so too does Mike’s resolve. His father is happy to abandon a woman he resented – just as he resents essentially everyone else in the small community they inhabit – but the memory of his mother is one of the few things that keeps Mike from utter loneliness. That loneliness is, of course, a central theme of Haigh’s work, and it is that quest to fight, to end that loneliness that defines it, including in “A Long Winter.”
Unlike his prior films, however, Haigh never gets to the emotional punchline, or maybe even the point, in “A Long Winter.” The movie astonishes you with persistent, sweeping takes of the Rockies, courtesy of Andre Turpin’s majestic cinematography. The beautiful light that emanates from the snow, the glassy glitter of the ground, and Mike’s determination to climb even higher into the mountains takes the film to new beauties with every passing moment. Emotionally, however, the film remains stagnated with the central character’s own stunted development. In this coming-of-age story, Mike never really comes of age. In this exploration of sexuality and tenderness, little is explored beyond the beautiful scenery. Lester’s nastiness gives him a more multidimensional development in a way that Mike never achieves, despite Hechinger’s best efforts, which are much appreciated. “A Long Winter” simply becomes frozen in the snow, unable to get to that next level.
At the tribute that preceded this film, Haigh explained that his goal in camera placement is typically trying to figure out what his characters are feeling. In that sense, he has become a masterful filmmaker. Hechinger is clearly a very talented actor, and can say thousands of words with just a few gazes. Haigh does well to focus on his face up close, from different angles and orientations. Even if his emotional maturation never comes, Mike is feeling a lot of things – sometimes conflicting things like youthful excitement and hormones together with the sadness of his missing mother. Even the closeups of Tommy and Lester are effective – the former is excited, the latter angry and also lonely. Haigh figures out what his characters are feeling, and so does his audience. There is no question that Haigh is extremely talented and that he easily makes the audience lose itself in the emotion of his stories, even if the emotion of this particular story is nowhere near as memorable as that of his prior work.
In the end, though, “A Long Winter” is a film of striking surfaces and muted depths, carried by Haigh’s patient eye and Hechinger’s quiet intensity. It is held back by a story that never fully breaks through its own ice. There is still plenty here to admire, particularly in the way Haigh lets landscape and faces do the work that dialogue might otherwise overstate. But admiration is not the same as astonishment, and the film never earns the devastating intimacy it seems to be reaching for and that seemed to come to Haigh so easily in his other movies. “A Long Winter’s” images linger long after the credits, even when its emotional revelations do not, making it a worthwhile but perhaps the most forgettable entry in Haigh’s body of work.
