Winter Solstice (2004)

This is a story about a widower who is raising two older sons....and he's apparently not up to the challenge and the boys are essentially like boats set adrift. After the father (Anthony LaPaglia) meets a new neighbor (Allison Janney), things start to change a bit for the better."Winter Solstice" is a film that frustrated me. While it is a film about alienation, the director made some decisions to increase this sense of loneliness and isolation that ended up seriously damaging the movie. Part of this was achieved by having almost no soundtrack at all for the film. What little there was turned out to be a single guitar. It was supposed to sound lonely...it sounded more cheap. Part of the director's vision was also to have the actors say very, very little. As a result, sometimes what they did seemed strange and confusing (such as the beds on the lawn scene). The film also ends...with very little actually resolved. Overall, while a lot of reviewers liked the film, many others disliked it....and the absolute lack of energy is much of the reason folks dislike it....me included. Just a small amount of energy would have helped the story immensely...helped folks to care about these people. Instead, it just felt like it was trying too hard to be hip and indie...and you really never cared about the people and their predicaments. It's also a shame because LaPaglia and Janney are excellent actors....but you just couldn't tell here.

I avoided watching this film....the summary on my cable station didn't entice me....sounded trite. However, tonight it happened to get my attention. The cable description was way off. (What a surprise.) It is a lovely, bittersweet story. One of the comments mentioned that it portrayed male communication and the commenter mentioned that women might find it to be frustrating, but educational. I come from an 'all girls' family with a father who is horrible at communicating emotion...especially affection. I found these guys to be very loving and supportive of one another despite their lack of talking about everything. Yet, they were sensitive, masculine beings....just the type of guy you can love. I liked the film and will catch it again.

Quick physics analogy here. (although I hate the discipline!) Imagine a family consisting of three forces pulling in opposite directions. What's gonna happen? Whatever exists between them is gonna start to show cracks, right? Well, even if this little scientific postulation of mine turns out to be incorrect, it still handily applies to the meditation on grief that "Winter Solstice" offers. If they were united as a group, they would be much stronger, but with the huge space vacated by a missing figure, they become a ship without a rudder.Fans, like me, of Lapaglia, Stanford or David Gordon Green's "All the Real Girls" should definitely come away from this with some food for thought. There are echoes of "In the Bedroom", too. Admirers of any mentioned will be pleasantly acquainted with the pace this film moves at as this is not a work for those who like their cinema to run loud, obvious and at a mile a minute. If low-key indie musing is your thing though, then I would suggest you check it out. It's content not to milk its material for moments of angst, so there are few showy moments for the actors. Suppressed anger is the main vent for hidden depths, so it could have been more 'raw', but taken together it nevertheless builds to something that is genuinely affecting.

As metaphors go towards reflecting character, this one is a good as it gets: Gardens "fall apart pretty quickly, and you have to take care of them." In Winter Solstice, Jim Winters' (Anthony LaPaglia) family needs plenty of care as it recovers from the loss of his wife and the two boys' mother. That piece of debut writer/director Josh Sternfield's dialog is reminiscent of Miles' discourse about pinot noir in Sideways--T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative" describes the state of the characters.In the Seinfeld mode, but without the humor, Winter Solstice is about nothing; little happens to set up traditional Greek rising and falling actions. It is profoundly about getting through without letting mom's death freeze you in sorrow. That older son Gabe (Aaron Stanford) plans to leave New Jersey for Florida is just another disappointment. That son Pete (Mark Webber) is a summer school regular hiding a bright mind must be endured until he emerges from his winter.Jim does as well as can be expected keeping his family whole. As for himself, his landscaping business keep him alive with the artistic promise of more beautiful flowers and the humanistic comfort of working with people and getting to know new temporary neighbor, Molly Ripkin (Allison Janney).The simplicity of the days coupled with the minimalism of dialog and plot defines this small movie, which executive produce LaPaglia must have known wouldn't make any money. But he made it, as he did the estimable Lantana, for reasons that may be tied to the garden analogy, taking care to be more than a TV star. As Gabe says about leaving his fine girlfriend behind, "That's my problem, and I'm dealing with it." I admire father, son, and director's ideals—they give us interesting small films such as Winter Solstice. As Shakespeare's Richard says in King Henry VI, Part iii, "I, that did never weep, now melt with woe/That winter should cut off spring-time so."