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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
COLD WEATHER Before moving onto more unfamiliar terrain, Cold Weather starts off as a character piece. Doug (Cris Lankenau), a former forensics student turned lowly ice factory worker, barely keeps his childhood dreams of becoming a detective simmering. He has moved back home to Portland to live with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). Meanwhile, his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Robyn Rikoon), reenters his life, but then she goes missing. Doug teams up with Gail and Carlos (Raúl Castillo), a colleague with a side career as a DJ, to unearth the truth of her whereabouts, and before you know it, Katz’s mumblecore vibe veers into Sherlock Holmesian mystery territory. While the carefully sustained mood and Keegan DeWitt’s chilling, industrial-sounding score hint at big surprises and set pieces, the machinations of Cold Weather’s plot never really take off. They’re at once too mundane to excite and too far-fetched to be believable in the context of these characters’ lives, and the stakes are never high enough. Using a non-actor as your lead is a big gamble that can pay off spectacularly (see Paranoid Park, for instance), but Lankenau can’t shoulder the burden, and Katz, holding static shots on him as if searching for a soul that doesn’t want to come out, doesn’t do him any favors. The dialogue is often over-the-top, expositional in a bad film noir way, and the emotional beats forced, even before the film veers into genre territory. Stuck somewhere between cogs in a plot and wearing their dysfunction on their sleeves, those surviving under Cold Weather’s atmosphere can’t break out into three-dimensional beings.After two
promising super low-budget films (Dance Party USA, Quiet City),
Katz has taken a step in a grander direction. The cinematography is more
calculated, the budget—while still small by most standards—is bigger,
and the plot more ambitious. The prospect of indie auteurs, reared on
microbudgets and extensive character development, invading and
reinventing the genre space is thrilling. But in his increase in scale,
Katz has left behind one important detail: characters we can
care about.
Patrick Wood
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