Winter Solstice

365 Films

Entry #90

Winter Solstice (2005)

Directed by Josh Sternfeld

Less you think that these entries are randomly assembled and hopelessly scrambled together in a vain attempt to produce some sort of coherent narrative, I’ll have you know that both Winter Solstice and yesterday’s entry Brief Encounter feature scenes of characters having pieces of grit removed from their eye-balls.  I totally and completely meant to do that.  I feel like there is also a scene in Pitch Black where somebody injects something into their eyeball, I guess I should do that next (I’m just kidding, Pitch Black isn’t a real movie, don’t be absurd).  Winter Solstice concerns a family’s attempt to move on from a horrific tragedy that has them seemingly stuck in place and time.  The father, a landscape gardener named Jim Winters has to contend with his two grown sons, one of whom is about to flunk out of high school and the other has been recently hit by a serious case of wanderlust and is itching to leave the nest.  The aforementioned tragedy was the loss of Jim’s wife and the boys’ mother in a fatal car accident.  So far it sounds like a fairly traditional low-key indie narrative and it most certainly is that but where Winter Solstice really shines is its attention to detail.  The setting is an anonymous Jersey suburb yet through the naturalistic sound design and idle pacing, writer-director Josh Sternfeld conveys everything you need to know about these people and their lives.  I don’t thing I’ve ever seen another movie where more characters ask each other “what are you up to?” than this one.  I don’t mean that flippantly by the way, it’s eerily emblematic of what it’s like to grow up in one of these types of areas.  That’s what always sticks the sharpest to me about Winter Solstice, the feeling that I know these neighborhoods, I know these fluorescent tinted hang outs, and most of all I know these people.  I suppose it also helps that I saw this during a time in my life when I never really experienced where I grew up represented on screen.  Winter Solstice is also indicative of another unique type of movie-going experience.  I remember when my brother and I checked this out at the Angelika way back in the spring of 2005, we knew very little to nothing about it going into the theater.  I believe it got a handful of decent reviews but nothing attention grabbing.  I think the primary motivating force for the both of us was the trailer’s use of the Iron and Wine song, Sunset Soon Forgotten (see below) and we figured anybody who’s down with the Beam can’t be too egregious a waste of time.  It’s a tricky thing to do in cinema, especially since we are so inundated with every single aspect of film production through blogs and other entertainment news aggregate sites (I know I’ve harped on this before so I’ll try not to again) but it’s a particularly unique sensation when something just completely surprises you out of the blue.  I went into this movie literally expecting nothing and I was hit with an evocation of a period in my life that I hadn’t figured out how to examine yet.  I’m not saying the film navigated me through my own memories but it certainly helped push the boat out to sea (if you’ll forgive my tortured metaphor, if that even is a metaphor).  That’s just one of the many reasons why cinema is such an invaluable art form.  One more personal rant, if you’ll indulge me for a few more sentences.  Winter Solstice was released a little less than a year after Garden State and drew about an infinitesimal percentage of its publicity and box office.  Examining the two films now, they both share thematic similarities concerning how families deal with collective grief in small Jersey neighborhoods.  The only difference is Garden State literally makes me squirm whenever I am unlucky enough to share its sphere of existence while Winter Solstice is like meeting up with an old friend.  I guess that whole hype thing can swing both ways sometimes.