Film Review

By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

First Snow
Directed by Mark Fergus
Yari Film Group 03/07 Feature Film
R - language, drug use, sexual content, some violence

Jimmy Starks (Guy Pearce) is a floor salesman who has a plan for making some big money by selling restored jukeboxes to bars all over America. He is a dreamer who has spent most of his life looking after himself and not giving much to others. When his car breaks down in a small town, Jimmy has some time to kill and on a whim decides to get a reading from a roadside fortune teller (J. K. Simmons). He learns two positive pieces of information: one about a basketball game and one about a financial deal that will be beneficial to him. But then the fortune teller sees something in Jimmy's future that makes him recoil. The salesman offers him more money, but he refuses to talk about what he saw.

Back in Albuquerque, Jimmy is having troubles with his live-in girlfriend, Deidre (Piper Perabo), who wants to settle down in Taos. He winces at the next task at hand, which is to fire his young protégé Andy (Rick Gonzalez) who was caught skimming money off the top just like Jimmy taught him. At a local bar, he meets Ed (William Fichtner), a co-salesman and buddy. They watch an underdog basketball team triumph in a game that nobody thought they could win. Then Jimmy learns that funding has come through for the jukebox deal from Dallas. Scared about his future, he heads back for another visit with the fortune teller. At gunpoint, the seer tells him: "I saw no more roads, no more tomorrows. You don't have much time left. . . . but you're safe until the first snow."

Impending death has a way of focusing one's life and making everything supercharged with meaning. That is the moral point of this psychological drama directed by Mark Fergus and co-written by Hawk Ostby. Guy Pearce does a credible job depicting the gigantic shift in Jimmy's life when he comes face-to-face with the prospect of his life ending with the first snow. His initial response is paranoia, which comes to the surface in a variety of ways. He has an especially onerous bit of unfinished business with Vincent (Shea Whigham), a childhood friend he once betrayed who has just been released from prison. But then something shifts inside Jimmy, and he thinks of someone besides himself. It is a new experience for him, and one that is worth while watching on the screen.

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by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat