The New York Times

‘Angels Crest,’ Starring Thomas Dekker - Review

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

December 29, 2011

The small, hardy community in the Rocky Mountains that gives “Angels Crest” its name is a rough-hewn working-class town of grain elevators and meat-and-potatoes eateries where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Ethan Denton (Thomas Dekker), the film’s main character, is a 21-year-old father who works in an auto parts shop and is raising his 3-year-old son, Nate, singlehandedly. The child’s mother, Cindy (Lynn Collins), a bitter and promiscuous alcoholic much older than Ethan, keeps her distance.

Tragedy strikes early, when Ethan packs Nate into his pickup truck and drives into the woods to hunt. After parking on the side of the road, he buckles his son into his child seat, turns up the heat and leaves Nate alone while he stalks deer. When Ethan returns, Nate has disappeared, and he panics. A frantic search ensues, with teams of men combing the woods. Even after the search is abandoned, Ethan continues looking for the boy, whom he eventually discovers frozen to death.

“Angels Crest,” directed by Gaby Dellal. is a sustained howl of grief in which Ethan’s unassailable sorrow and guilt send an arrow into your heart. In these scenes the screenplay, adapted by Catherine Trieschmann from a novel by Leslie Schwartz, captures the same excruciating pain beyond words that Atom Egoyan distilled in his adaptation of “The Sweet Hereafter” by Russell Banks. That film, about a small town’s trauma after many of its children die in a school bus accident, had more concentrated grief than any film I can recall.

But the other parts of “Angels Crest” mostly don’t fit. Although the movie captures the solidarity and the beauty and peril of a rustic mountain town whose residents are necessarily interdependent, its individual subplots don’t connect. Despite several solid performances, the characters are too hazily sketched and too loosely linked to form a meaningful chain.

Ms. Collins as the absentee mother, who in a rage tries to run down Ethan in her car, is a self-pitying, one-dimensional nightmare. A story line involving Cindy’s relationship with her devout mother (Barbara Williams) tries and fails to humanize her. When Cindy snaps at her mother, “You have your god; I have mine,” a reference to booze, all you feel is disgust.

Another subplot involving Ethan’s best friend, Rusty (Joseph Morgan), who was sleeping with Cindy when the tragedy occurred, is left undeveloped. A strand that follows Ethan’s friend Jane (Elizabeth McGovern), a lesbian waitress at the diner that is a kind of clearinghouse for the film’s characters, drifts aimlessly. Nate’s death makes Jane uncomfortably aware of her own troubled history as a parent. (Her grown son shows up with his pregnant girlfriend.) The incident also fortifies the bond between the diner’s proprietor, Angie (Mira Sorvino), another undeveloped character, and her young daughter.

Most out of place is Jeremy Piven as Jack, a local district attorney, with his own tragic baggage that (frustratingly) is alluded to but never specified. Jack, who seeks to prosecute Ethan for criminally negligent homicide, methodically interviews the townspeople, whom he finds to be divided over Ethan’s culpability.

All of this adds up to much ado about much less than meets the eye. Situations that could illuminate merely distract. And the abrupt, melodramatic conclusion feels unearned. Despite its earnest and frostbitten atmosphere, “Angels Crest” is a film of sadly missed opportunities.

“Angels Crest” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations and strong language.

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Gaby Dellal; written by Catherine Trieschmann, based on the book by Leslie Schwartz; director of photography, David Johnson; edited by Mick Audsley and Giles Bury; music by Stephen Warbeck; production design by Louise Middleton; costumes by Christine Thomson; produced by Shirley Vercruysse and Leslie Cowan; released by Magnolia Pictures. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.

WITH: Thomas Dekker (Ethan), Lynn Collins (Cindy), Elizabeth McGovern (Jane), Joseph Morgan (Rusty), Jeremy Piven (Jack), Mira Sorvino (Angie), Kate Walsh (Roxanne) and Barbara Williams (Cindy’s Mother).

Angels Crest

Director Gaby Dellal

Writers Leslie Schwartz, Catherine Trieschmann

Stars Thomas Dekker, Lynn Collins, Elizabeth McGovern, Joseph Morgan, Jeremy Piven

Running Time 1h 32m