Sternfeld keeps emotions at bay.
It’s like waiting patiently at a deserted intersection for the light to turn from red to green, but only realizing some time later that the bulb is burnt out. Unlike Todd Field’s In the Bedroom or Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, director-writer Josh Sternfeld’s slow-moving drama is not interested in tying up complicated matters in one sitting – instead, Winter Solstice offers only morsels of melancholy, keeping emotions at a room-controlled temperature.
Set in a white, upper class suburbs of Jersey, the film explores how a widowed father (Anthony LaPaglia) and his two troubled teens independently deal with the unresolved. Sternfeld’s doesn’t employ a talkative solution in his examination of how men grieve after the loss of a matriarch; instead the film is content at scratching the surface with a day in the life formula. LaPaglia incorporates some of his gem performance in Lantana, he is an irritated soul who can’t get over the loss of his best friend, and viewers will sense his injured and angered psyche gone adrift especially in the anxiety moments found in an awkward new friendship.
With an interesting docu-backdrop and an unimpressive guitar string score, the film retains a calmness throughout – the emotional void and the sustained non-climatic points in narrative make for very few sweeps of emotions. A couple of implanted messages in conversations about garden upkeep and Genghis Khan offers safe anecdotes about living without a leader, or in this case without a mother, but there is this sense that no risks are being taken with the material, and the lack of direction ultimately insures that the film’s subtle performances and slightly maligned characters never get their say on the matter.
While Sternfeld’s debut refreshingly avoids the accustomed embrace the usual screen interpretations of family sorrow and ultimately develops into a film that speaks about those who do not speak, Winter Solstice is so minimalist in scope that it never attempts to take a chance at gripping the viewer. Audiences expecting strong car-crash dramatic moments will be terribly disappointed by the absence of the true spirit of sadness.
