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Cold comfort

The Winter Guest deserves a visit

by Peter Keough

*** THE WINTER GUEST Directed by Alan Rickman. Written by Alan Rickman and Sharman Macdonald based on Macdonald's play. With Emma Thompson, Phyllida Law, Gary Hollywood, Arlene Cockburn, Sheila Reid, Sandra Voe, Douglas Murphy, Sean Biggerstaff, and Tom Watson. A Fine Line Features release. Delayed release. Now playing at the West Newton.

There's a chill of mortality in the air these days, at least in movie theaters. Joining Titanic and The Sweet Hereafter in this celebration of the Great Inevitable is Alan Rickman's directorial debut, The Winter Guest. Not nearly as traumatic as the other two -- it could be compared to Titanic without the ship, only the iceberg, or The Sweet Hereafter minus the bus -- The Winter Guest meanders about its subject with the insinuating persistence of a freezing breeze.

Based on the play by Sharman Macdonald, who co-wrote the script, Guest is dense in dialogue (blurred at times by the thick accents of some of the cast) and almost devoid of action, qualities Rickman for the most part turns into virtues. Although it wavers at times from the precise to the precious, it's an auspicious first film, a stark, sometimes stagy, surprisingly funny snow globe of a movie that's both cozy and insidiously unsettling.

Having great actors on hand and having a great actor's intuition in directing them is a big plus for Rickman, as is the bleakly stunning setting -- a desolate Scottish coastal town on a winter's day so cold the sea has frozen (The Winter Guest favors the pathetic fallacy). An opening shot finds Frances (Emma Thompson) embalmed in bed in her frosty, whitewashed bedroom. Intercut is the progress of a tiny dark figure across a snowfield -- her mother, Elspeth (Thompson's real-life mother, Phyllida Law; the two have the mother/daughter thing down so well that at times it's downright annoying), the ostensible, unexpected guest of the title. Reaching the village, she slips and falls, and the camera sails off from her and out to sea, tracking over the ice and toward the limitless mist beyond: Frances's dream, it seems, one from which she starts to wakefulness.

Death, in fact, has already paid a call on Frances. She's a photographer, and her house is haunted by prints of her last study -- her now dead husband. Elspeth arrives to rouse her from her mourning -- to discuss her loss, her plans, and her new haircut (Mom approves only of the first). Elspeth prevails upon Frances to stroll the monochromatic streets and seascape, camera at hand, and the two unknowingly join three other pairs of wanderers, each vaguely drawn to the same destination.

Although the characters are schematic -- each pair representing a different age of humanity coming to grips with the big questions -- Rickman deftly follows their sometimes intersecting paths. In addition to the mother and daughter there's Frances's teenage son Alex (Gary Hollywood) and the hoydenish Nita (Arlene Cockburn), who meet on the street and gravitate to a hot bath and a warm fireplace. Filling out the other demographics are two schoolboys, scurrilous Sam (Douglas Murphy) and doubting Tom (Sean Biggerstaff), who discuss penis enlargement and the futility of life on the eerily blank shoreline; and a pair of elderly pals, birdlike Lily (Sheila Reid) and doughy Chloe (Sandra Voe), who take a bus to a funeral -- their way of killing time until someone attends their own.

Macdonald's dialogue veers from Beckett-like flintiness to Hallmark treacle; the rowdy dialogue of the young lads as they talk nasty and nihilistic is especially unconvincing. At times, too, the ellipses and non sequiturs seem less like the rhythms of real talk than a mannered imitation. When spoken by Thompson and Law, however (and surprisingly by Hollywood and Cockburn, who bring erotic tension and adolescent vulnerability and anarchy to their roles), the lines are like brittle rime glazing depths of feeling.

As in the masterful opening sequence, though, Rickman is at his most powerful when wordless. At times some stagy business creaks -- the discovery of abandoned kittens nearly undoes the ending. For the most part, however, his visual sense is assured, poetic, and subtle. Framed by rocks, silhouetted figures peering into the sea possess the grandeur of Caspar David Friedrich canvases, and the barren architecture of the town looms like a labyrinth of solitude. Most compelling, though, are his unabashed close-ups of faces: Thompson's astonishment as she sees her mother clearly at last and reaches for her camera is epiphanic. After this distinguished Guest appearance, Rickman shouldn't remain a stranger to directing.