We’re witnessing the last laps of the Scandinavian crime wave,
that border-crossing multimedia movement that washed so much frosty-to-glacial
genre fiction onto our shores and screens. The detective heroes of TV imports Wallander and The Bridge walked into the low winter sunset, while the Lisbeth
Salander cycle has stalled to a point where reboots have been decreed necessary.
Adapting The Snowman, one of
Norwegian scribe Jo Nesbø’s bestselling Harry Hole mysteries, isn’t the
studios’ worst idea of 2017. Yet it does feel a tardy one, and despite the
industry heft thrown at Tomas Alfredson’s film, its execution leaves much to be
desired. Beyond these stellar opening credits, there stretch two hours of icy,
mostly lifeless waste.
Nesbø’s seventh
Hole book provides the basis for this first movie, hence a certain frontloading
of defective-detective tics. Michael Fassbender’s Harry is discovered blotto in
an Oslo bus shelter, before stumbling back to a singleton’s untended apartment.
“We found mould behind the walls,” shrugs the handyman spraying for dry rot,
triggering a loud characterisation-through-property klaxon. It’s literary mildew
that spreads elsewhere: Harry has a troubled relationship with his gallerist ex
(Charlotte Gainsbourg), bathroom cupboards stocked deep with Diazepam, and a
stack of unopened letters on his desk, most urgent among them being taunting
missives from a serial killer leaving snowmen behind at the scene of his crimes.
Sniggers at early trailers suggest these melting markers will
be but one of this notionally sombre thriller’s weak spots. As Harry and
equally harassed partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) rifle through years of
missing-persons reports, we’re introduced to a whole grotto’s-worth of
carrot-noses. There are forlorn-looking snowmen and irked-looking snowmen;
flashbacks featuring Val Kilmer as a pie-eyed detective predecessor uncover remote
mountaintop snowmen; at one point, there’s even a snowman bearing the severed
head of Chloe Sevigny. “She was a free spirit,” eulogises the deceased’s twin
sister, played altogether bathetically by a second Sevigny – and yes, this is
the kind of film that thinks nothing of casting Chloe Sevigny as identical-twin
chicken farmers.
Yet these rogue Olafs – chilling on the page, laughable when
made literal on screen – are just the tip of the iceberg. Plot and screen soon
throng with self-evident red herrings: James d’Arcy as an uptight husband,
David Dencik as an oddball therapist with fuchsia-pink toenails, an underplaying
J.K. Simmons as a local grandee trying to bring something called the Winter
Sports World Cup to Oslo. It is the standard drift of Scandinavian crime
fiction that all murders should point up the food chain towards corrupt,
abusive or otherwise wonky administrations, but one of The Snowman’s biggest letdowns is how the promising Dencik-Simmons
business winds up a narrative dead-end, somewhere between timewasting feint and
audience cheat.
Such non-sequiturs, coupled with three screenwriting credits,
insinuate this wasn’t the smoothest adaptation process. It may have been a
non-negotiable Nesbøism that the Snowman Killer is kept on hold for
long spells while the leads look into one another’s pasts: novelists generally
do thread-juggling better than mainstream movies. Yet there’s a pungent whiff
of contrivance about the video-fingerprint technology that requires Katrine to
lug ugly, heavy kit around, and inevitably yields the clue that cracks the
case. That outcome conveniently resolves all Harry’s issues in one go, while
leaving viewers with a dozen or more hang-on-a-minute loose ends to pick
through on the grumpy trudge back to the car.
If that process were livelier, The Snowman might have provided functional distraction, but as in
his plodding Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot
points as though filling in some I-Spy
Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches. He permits one novelty – an unexpected
revival of Hot Butter’s 1972 hit “Popcorn” – and has the advantage of
screen-filling Nordic scenery, but his pacing makes the original Salander
movies seem turbocharged. Mostly, he concerns himself with reproducing the
atmospheric conditions of his breakthrough Let
the Right One In, fogging up the viewfinder before the final reel’s choppy,
unconvincing and desperately anticlimactic action.
The idiosyncratic performers might have boosted it, yet where Fassbender
brought new, uncanny qualities to bear during his recent Alien androidry, here he’s stuck playing Composite Scandie Detective.
Standing amid wide open spaces in woollens and parka, his Harry stares
frequently into the middle distance, sporadically smoking for added notes of disquiet.
Watching him wheel around one scene atop a library cart, we’re struck chiefly
by the actor’s own boredom, and it’s a sticking point when your leading man
appears bored an hour into a possible franchise-starter. After two hours of The Snowman, we know precisely why Harry
Hole takes to drinking in bus shelters. We may even be tempted to join him
there.
An after-the-goldrush project like this shortsells everyone
eventually. Blink and you’ll miss Toby Jones, playing one more gobbet of
exposition; Kilmer’s now ferociously lived-in presence seizes the attention
during his five minutes of screen time, but he appears the victim of either
dubbing or indifferent ADR; putting Gainsbourg in an LBD is the film’s thin
idea of style. Any hope Ferguson might produce some consolatory warmth or heat
with her co-star gets extinguished early on, and while it’s almost a relief
when the film abandons its limp attempts to make Katrine interesting and instead
generates another damsel-in-distress, it’s also an admission of defeat, marking
the point at which Alfredson abandons any pretension to serious drama.
It’s a pity, as recent box-office charts have framed this as a
boomtime for R-rated entertainments, but you can’t see a perfunctory,
much-tinkered-with chore like this sticking round in multiplexes for long.
Lacking the pulpy kick and verve of 2011’s native Nesbø
adaptations Headhunters and Jackpot, The Snowman is too ponderous to quicken the pulse, and too drably,
insistently grey to provide an accidental campfest for would-be snowmen-spotters.
For all the considerable nous assembled either side of the camera, no-one can
rescue it from its own mediocrity: if this were the opening tranche of a TV
miniseries, you’d be exploring other channels some time between the second and
third ad breaks.
Rating:
C-
The Snowman is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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