Mortal combat

>> Guy Pearce struggles with his foretold
doom in the frustrating First Snow

by MARK SLUTSKY

Everybody’s probably wondered at one time or another whether they’d like to know, if given the choice, the time of their own death. I’d personally give the idea a big “no thanks” (damn, I’ve got way too much to worry about already), but as the premise for a movie, it’s got promise. What would you do if you knew you were on a really, really tight schedule?

That’s the idea behind First Snow, the directorial debut from screenwriter Mark Fergus (he’s one of the names credited for writing Children of Men, although don’t let that get your hopes unreasonably high here). The movie, which is set in the suburbs of New Mexico, stars Guy Pearce as a flooring salesman and hustler type looking to get rich with a scheme to sell vintage jukeboxes. He’s clearly a bit shady, with some definite dark secrets in his past, but he doesn’t seem like an entirely bad—or for the movie’s purposes, irredeemable—guy.

Stuck at a truck stop after his car breaks down, Pearce visits a roadside fortuneteller on a whim (J.K. Simmons, playing very restrained here compared to his turns in the Spider-Man movies and Oz), whose predictions prove eerily accurate. Returning later for more advice, Pearce gets the bad news: he’s doomed, and his fate, whatever it is, will befall him with the year’s First Snowfall.

From that point, First Snow doesn’t seem sure whether it wants to be a humane meditation on death and forgiveness, as Pearce tries to set his life straight, or a straight-up thriller, as he tries to get out of actually dying, and it suffers for it. Fergus plays the Final Destination card by introducing a bunch of red herrings to keep you guessing just how Pearce is going to buy it, but it’s never particularly suspenseful—possibly because if you follow the movie’s internal logic, Pearce is never going to be in actual mortal danger until that fateful snowfall, so you know he’s pretty much invincible until that happens.

Finally, First Snow ends with unforgivable abruptness. Though the movie has a likeable sincerity, and its backdrop, the suburban Southwest, is pleasantly unusual as a movie milieu, it falls prey to its undercooked, frustrating fatalism.

First Snow Opens Friday, April 6

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