Screening at the New York Film Festival: Andrew Haigh’s ‘A Long Winter’
Observer ·
Set on an isolated Colorado homestead in the 1950s, the Colm Tóibín adaptation charts a closeted son's slow awakening as his mother's absence lays bare secrets his household kept hidden.
Based on Colm Tóibín’s novella of the same name, A Long Winter provides the perfectly glacial venue for Andrew Haigh’s signature restraint. Set in the Colorado Rockies, the taut two-hour drama follows a crumbling family in the 1950s, when the young adult Mikey (Fred Hechinger) returns after months away to find his mother Louise (Caitríona Balfe) on the verge of leaving his stern father Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) for good. When she wanders off amid a snowstorm, the two men are left to fend for themselves, as family secrets and lingering tensions are forced gradually to the surface until the ice mercifully thaws.
We first glimpse Louise through Mikey’s eyes, as the sensitive youth makes his way back to their isolated homestead. He’s clearly attached to her, though she seems a tad more fond of his younger brother Tommy (Kit Connor), who’s about to leave to fight in the Korean War. Mikey’s point of view is limited and incomplete by design, and Haigh uses it to slowly unfurl the unpleasantness lurking beneath the family’s prim façade. One afternoon, Mikey returns from farmwork to find that Louise has broken a glass, leading to him learning about her alcoholism—something of which everyone, including his father and brother, already seemed aware.
These harsh truths come further to light when Louise finally up and leaves, for reasons Mikey is forced to understand and internalize over many frigid months. A boy pining for his mother, and a man coming into his own—both as a closeted gay youth, and a bachelor who can barely cook or clean—Mikey’s relationship with the gruff patriarch Lester is defined by Louise’s absence, which in turn forces him to view his father, and eventually himself, through her eyes. The more he learns about her unhappiness (through other people’s whispers—including her brother, played by Martin Freeman), the more his understanding of the world tips slowly on its axis.
As the snow thickens, the authorities give up on the search for Louise, but Mikey isn’t so pessimistic. He spends the winter making daily trips from the family cabin, as far as he can go, taking his father’s new live-in cook and helper Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) along. Questions of Mikey’s orientation are never confronted directly, but Jimmy’s radiant presence and Mikey’s lingering stares nudge him toward further uncertainty. Whether or not Lester knows or suspects anything about his son, his wife’s absence turns him venomous toward the younger men in his life, positioning him as both a physical and emotional blockade.
The film’s conclusions are foregone by design. The loss of hope of finding Louise creeps up gradually on Mikey, without a definitive breaking point around which to center his grief. In the process, his coming-of-age saga is particularly thorny. He and Lester can’t give names to their respective agonies, which manifest as animus between father and son, but don’t follow a strictly linear path. Some days are terrible. Others are better. And some are filled with vivid dreams and visions, amid the dueling beauty and brutality of the snow.
These forces may as well push and pull at one another within Mikey’s very being, as he slowly tries to reconcile the truth of his mother’s misery with his own duty toward his family farm, and his own prospects as a young man who, in theory, has his whole life ahead of him. The world around Mikey and Lester has been slowly modernizing, but they willingly live in the past, with all its rustic charm and emotional savagery masquerading as stoicism, which Haigh and cinematographer André Turpin turn into an enveloping fabric of deep shadows and warm flame.
The plot of A Long Winter may be simple—it’s about two men waiting for the seasons to change—but it’s also a film of metamorphosis delayed and denied, as the fear of new revelations brings with it the possibility of places, feelings and experiences unknown. There comes a vital point where Mikey, knowing full well the implications, wishes his winter of arrested uncertainties would last forever, because the lingering unknown is all he knows.
He lives on the precipice of adulthood, but actually stepping toward that chasm—whether to accept himself or the tragedies he cannot change—is the most terrifying thing in the world. Simply lying in the snow, and accepting its piercing chill, is far easier by comparison. This is what makes A Long Winter so riveting when Mikey is no longer left with a choice, and has to move forward just to keep up with life’s greatest inevitabilities: loss, heartache and the sensation of leaving behind all familiar comforts, whether they take the form of four walls or the imperfect people we love.