I’ll give It Snows All the Time credit for being unintentionally funny. A bar fight scene is so poorly staged that one wonders why they didn’t just do another take or film it in one unedited shot – anything would’ve been better than this display of incompetence. The family seems sadistically intent on subjecting Paul to situations that inevitably lead to them being upset with him and his lapses in memory/comprehension. “I don’t want mustard!” Paul shouts at a diner before screaming at a nearby child. He walks off during a neighborhood block party. He does catch a fish, so not all hope is lost.
The filmmaker piles it on thick, syrupy artifice coating each clumsily cut, horrendously written scene. “I will not have drugs in my house, you understand me?” the mother screams at her son, mortified at the mere notion of marijuana. In another “heavy” scene, Jesse discovers illegal substances in dad’s car. “Confused?” Jesse cries. “Maybe it’s the booze and the pot that’s got him confused!” Later, he proclaims: “Well, maybe I wanted to experience something outside of Omaha, okay?”
“…piles it on thick, syrupy artifice, coating each clumsily cut, horrendously written scene.”
Brett Cullen, a screen veteran, seems lost, which I guess is fitting, but sometimes it feels like his confusion stems from the actual actor being confounded about his presence on the set. Erich Hover fares worse in the lead, enunciating lines as if rehearsing them (“Jeez, what’s with all the construction and road blocks?!”). The scene where he almost cries may make the viewer almost gag. The rest of the cast goes through the motion, with only Lesley Ann Warren managing to add a spark of class to the proceedings.
It Snows All the Time resembles a prolonged PSA with all the production values and depth of an infomercial. It fails as both melodrama and character study, casting a superficial glance at a very serious subject. “There’s over 5 million Americans with this disease,” a doctor states at one point. Let’s not subject them to this film, shall we?
"…Lesley Ann Warren [manages] to add a spark of class..."
My mother has a severe case of dementia. She’s 92.