Angels Crest Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

Angels Crest Blu-ray Movie Review

Indie melodrama at its most insufferable.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater April 4, 2012

If the events of Angels Crest were real, TV yapping head Nancy Grace would fly into full-on tragedy-monger mode. The film is about the death of a three-year-old due to his father's negligence, and if there's one thing Grace gets all fire-and-brimstone about, it's needlessly dead kids and their stupid, life-endangering parents. Which is understandable, even if Nancy G.'s wrath comes out in the form of the yellowest of crass and lurid yellow journalism. Angels Crest has a similar problem. The death of a child is a perfectly suitable topic for a drama, but since that situation is so prone to heightened emotions to begin with, it's quite easy for a film tackling the issue to slide from pathos, invoking feelings of genuine compassion in an audience, to bathos, which is basically when the material becomes so maudlin and exaggerated that it provokes the opposite of the intended effect. We laugh at the really sad parts or wince at the characters--for being so over the top--not with them. Melodrama: It's when good drama goes bad. Angels Crest doesn't even try to find a balance between the serious and the sensationalized.

Uh, wasn't my kid in here half an hour ago?

The film lost me in its first ten minutes. We open in a small nowheresville in the Rocky Mountains, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody's business and where the shabby storefronts haven't been updated since the Nixon administration. Twenty-one-year-old single father Ethan Denton (Thomas Dekker) works in a ramshackle auto garage and lives in the back room with his dimple-faced toddler, Nate. The morning of winter's first big snow, Ethan drives Nate way out into the mountains to go sledding, but hey, what the hell, first he decides to track some deer deep into the woods. He cranks the heat in his truck, locks the door, and then leaves the sleeping kid strapped into the carseat. When he comes back a half hour later, yep--you guessed it--Nate ain't there.

Now, set aside the fact that this sort of thing does indeed happen occasionally in real life. It doesn't matter. Leaving your three-year-old unattended in an idling truck out in the middle of a mountain pass during a snowstorm is such an idiotic move that Ethan--no matter how great his grief--just isn't relatable as a character. Well, yeah, you think, of course the kid is missing. You're an imbecile. Way to go, dad. A massive manhunt is staged by the local cops and a bevy of townsfolk volunteers, but when the sun goes down the search is called off for safety's sake. Ethan presses on through the night, though, and finds Nate the next morning, frozen solid.

Once Nate went missing, my first thought was that maybe--just maybe--the film would turn into a kind of high-stakes kidnapping/murder mystery, a wider, more involving conspiracy than simply moron dad leaves son alone to wander off and freeze to death. If only. Instead, Angels Crest--directed by Gaby Dellal and based on a novel by Leslie Schwartz--attempts to be a simple portrait of grief, showing how the loss of an innocent affects an entire small-town community. For this to work, the film would at least need well-written characters and a plot that ties them together in interesting ways. It has neither. Oh, it has characters alright--scads of them--but they're little more than limp stereotypes. As for their interconnectedness, Angels Crest is a total tease--the film repeatedly sets up potentially dramatic scenarios and then fails to develop them in any meaningful way.

Example #1: Ethan's ex-girlfriend and Nate's mother. Cindy--an overly emoting Lynn Collins--is a promiscuous, heavily eye-linered alcoholic whose problems with drink caused her to cede her parental rights to Ethan. When we're first introduced to her, on the morning Nate goes missing, she's in bed with Ethan's best friend, Rusty (Joseph Morgan). This, we reasonably think, might turn out to be a big deal. Nope, not really. And then there's Cindy's deeply religious mom (Barbara Williams), who shows up for the funeral and contributes nothing to the story except to pester Cindy about her lifestyle.

Example #2: The lesbian couple who are only tangentially involved but figure prominently in the story for some reason. Jane (Elizabeth McGovern) is something of a surrogate mother to Ethan, and her relationship with her partner, Roxanne (Kate Walsh), has been strained since her real son--a total homophobe--has come to live with them, with his knocked-up girlfriend in tow. What does this have to do with Nate and Ethan? Not much.

Example #3: The district attorney with the deep dark secret. Jeremy Piven plays a prosecutor who brings Ethan to trial on charges of negligence, and though there are constant hints that he took on Nate's case because it hits close to home, the film never gets into any detail about his personal history.

Example #4: The purposeless proprietress. Mira Sorvino plays the owner of the town's greasy-spoon diner. I can't remember a single thing she did in the film other than tell Ethan they were out of turkey sandwiches.

Example #5: The dumb dad. Don't even get me started on how the film resolves Ethan's character arc. The ending is the ultimate in melodramatic, oh my god, isn't he so tortured narrative copouts. I quite literally threw my hands up in the air when the screen cut to black.

Angels Crest just doesn't work. At all. It wants to show how small-town lives intersect and overlap, but it doesn't give its characters much of anything to do. It wants us to feel the trauma of a child's death, but it only succeeds in stunning us with the idiocy of the kid's dad. And when the high-powered emotions kick in--look out!--you'll be rolling your eyes and grimacing and generally feeling bad for the otherwise decent actors. The theatrical prospects for the film were almost nil--you won't be surprised to learn it only opened on a single screen this January, raking in all of $500-- and I can't see Angels Crest gaining much traction on home video either. If ever a film spun its wheels in the snow, going nowhere, it's this one.

Angels Crest Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

If Angels Crest has one thing going for it--and yeah, it pretty much only has this one thing--it's that it looks great on Blu-ray, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation that's colorful and exceptionally sharp. The film was shot digitally with with the Red One camera, which has rapidly become the go-to rig for independent filmmakers who need stunning picture quality on a budget. The level of detail in the image is exemplary, from cloth fibers to chin whiskers, tree bark texture to the pores and wrinkles on the actors' faces. We're talking fine fine detail most of the time. Color is rich and vibrant too, with punchy contrast and solid black levels, giving the picture a truly dimensional quality in many scenes. Source noise rarely rises into the visible-from-a-distance range, and I didn't spot any overly apparent compression issues or encode problems. Unfortunately, this Grade-A picture quality is attached to a Grade-D film.

Angels Crest Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Like most Magnolia Home Entertainment titles, Angels Crest comes equipped with a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. This is a fairly quiet, largely dialogue-driven film, but the mix nonetheless finds opportunity to fill out the soundscape with ambience when it can. The early outdoor scenes are especially lively, with wind and snow blowing through the pine boughs--and wafting through rear speakers--along with the sound of a rushing glacial river. Voices are always cleanly recorded, well-balanced in the mix, and easily understood, and the minimal score sounds great when it swells to accentuate the more emotional moments. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

Angels Crest Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 1:59): Five deleted scenes, including alternate endings and openings. With optional commentary by director Gaby Dellal.
• Cast Interviews (SD): Thomas Dekker (16:19) and Mira Sorvino (9:34) discuss their characters and what drew them to the film.
• HDNet: A Look at Angels Crest (1080p, 4:47): A typical HDNet promo, featuring a plot synopsis and quick interviews with Thomas Dekker and Mira Sorvino.
• Angels Crest Trailer (1080p, 2:19)
• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment (1080p, 9:51)

Angels Crest Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's tricky making a film about the tragedy of a young child's death, and Angels Crest trips into just about every imaginable narrative and emotional pitfall. It's melodramatic. It's poorly scripted. It builds--if "builds" is even the right word--to a thoughtless, uh, I guess we have to end the movie somehow climax. I needn't go on. Skip it.