By Jason Osiason
A Long Winter is an achingly beautiful coming-of-age film about realizing that your parents’ mistakes don’t have to become your life. That can take a long time to understand when you’re still living with them, still trying to make them happy, and Andrew Haigh gives that process the patience it needs. I loved how gradually Mike begins to imagine a life beyond the one he’s inherited, even while he’s frightened of losing what he has.
Fred Hechinger’s Mike lives with his family high in the Colorado mountains in the early fifties. His brother, Kit Connor’s Tommy, leaves for the Army. His mother, Caitríona Balfe’s Louise, has been slowly disappearing from their lives long before she walks into a blizzard and doesn’t come back. Mike and his father keep looking for her, and the search goes on until it becomes difficult to say what either of them expects to find. Meanwhile, Mike is discovering things he wants for himself. I found that particularly moving: he’s worried about his mother and beginning to recognize how much else there might be to his life.
Haigh is so good at the loneliness of wanting something you don’t have a word for yet. It’s there in Weekend, 45 Years and All of Us Strangers, and here he gives it a whole valley to occupy. There are things Mike is beginning to want that this place simply doesn’t stock. The mountains are beautiful, but spending so much time looking at them makes the isolation feel exhausting. Haigh holds those wide shots long enough for you to notice how exposed the people are against all that snow. The mood swallowed me whole. I felt completely inside this place, including when I wanted Mike to get out of it.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Lester is tremendous. He’s a man accustomed to turning his feelings into work, and there’s something painful about watching him reach a point where being useful won’t help. Moss-Bachrach lets you see how unfamiliar that helplessness is to him. I was especially taken with the moments when Lester struggles in front of his son, unable to conceal something he doesn’t know how to discuss. I think it’s the best work he’s put on screen.
The sadness was there for me long before the ending. I cared about these people enough to sit with the searching and the uncertainty, and Mike’s curiosity about his own future became just as important to me as finding out what had happened to his mother. I kept thinking about him on the walk home. It’s my favorite of the festival so far, and nothing has caught it. [A-]
