Aubrey Malone
Widowed fisherwoman Barb (Emma Thompson) is driving through northern Minnesota when she spots a kidnapped teenage girl. She loses her phone signal. Then her truck gives up. She’s 66 years old but she’s determined to rescue the girl.
In between efforts to do that she harks back to her own youth, to times she spent tending a sick husband, to thoughts of loyalty, sacrifice, regeneration.
There are so many things going on in Dead of Winter (15) it’s like a smorgasbord of would-be poign-ance. It’s easy to see what the film is getting at, but running such themes in tandem with the graphic violence works to the detriment of both.
It should have been made either as a thriller or a romance. Combining the two genres and adding on backstories involving both the young Barb – Thompson’s real life daughter Gaia Wise doing the hon-ours here – compromises things further.
Thompson tries her best but in the end the task proves beyond her. When you’re as firmly established in the celluloid pantheon as she is and you decide to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith into unchart-ed waters – both in terms of genre and nationality – you’re walking a tightrope over a very deep abyss.
Trying to be ‘Mumsie’ along with her Sigourney Weaver/Uma Thurman action heroine antics was al-ways going to be problematic. At one stage we find her stitching a bullet wound with one hand. At another she does that Bruce Willis thing where you throw yourself to the ground before firing a shot. Where does a 66-year-old fisherwoman learn stunts like that?
Her character is confused from the outset. She combines elements of hysteria and recklessness, evinc-ing one reaction where the other is called for and vice versa.
When she’s being folksy waddling round in the snow we take her as we find her but then her life is endangered by two people who seem to be maniacs (Marc Menchaca and Judy Greer) and she throws caution to the wind.
What’s going on? Does she not realise what these people are capable of? Then there’s the dispensa-tion of homespun wisdom in the midst of terror. Imprisoned in a cellar with a murderer about to re-turn any second, she starts discussing, I kid you not, childbirth with her fellow captor.
Such errancies might have worked in a Coen Brothers film like Fargo where the leading character is an eccentric. Thompson is portrayed as one for much of the time here but there’s always that British pragmatism lurking. We never forget we’re watching Emma Thompson. Emma wouldn’t normally have such a tacit acceptance of the multiple weirdnesses she experiences here.
Her accent is overcooked too. Has she been watching Kathy Bates videos? The secret of doing accents is not to do them, just as the secret of playing a drunk person is to try to act sober. Because that’s what most drunk people try to do.