From the archives: Winter Of Frozen Dreams
Thora Birch and Brendan Sexton III don't quite sell a confused collage
the true crime that's worth your time
We’re opening up the Best Evidence archives for a little while. Today’s review will look familiar to paid subscribers: it’s the bonus write-up from last October, on 2009’s scripted take on the Barbara Hoffman case. We’ll have more heritage content coming through in the next few days, free to everyone, while behind the scenes we’re map out our relocation.
In the meantime, Andy Dehnart at reality blurred kindly lent us some homepage real estate for vintage reviews of Natalia Grace’s first chapter, and Mommy Dead and Dearest, so check those out as well. Thanks again, Andy, and thank YOU, readers, for your patience! — Sarah and Eve
On Christmas 1977, Gerald Davies, 31, walked into Madison Police Headquarters and announced: “Last night I helped bury a body in a snowbank.”
Davies, a clerk at the University of Wisconsin, said he did not know the dead man’s identity or how he died. His role was simply to help dispose of the body for his fiancée, Barbara Hoffman.
The story
I don’t know where to begin with 2009’s Winter of Frozen Dreams, a film with a lot going on outside the frame and not enough inside it. …Okay, that’s not completely accurate; the issue is that it’s hard to tell whether the occasionally stately pace and ambiguous shot composition is purposeful, or paralyzed. It’s not a bad sit…probably? I’d love to speak more definitively, but I can’t, because I still don’t think I understand what the movie’s trying to do, and why.
Based on the book by Karl Harter, Winter has four screenwriters in the credits, which might explain why sometimes it’s a tone poem about emotional permafrost and how many men are islands, and other times it’s a Zodiac-dry take on a police-department generation gap…and other other times it’s a cynical meditation on the dumb shit men do while thinking with the little head.
Not that these ideas can’t co-exist in a single story, of course, but they merely co-exist here, is the thing. They don’t seem to parallel or inform one another, which might elevate the material above yet another meticulously production-designed period piece about a lethal lady whose powers of intellect and/or manipulation fell juuuust a bit short.
The acting comes close to doing the work the script doesn’t; Dan Moran as Harry Berge really inhabits that narrow blue band of holiday loneliness in a northern clime. Keith Carradine and Leo “Tully from Kids” Fitzpatrick have a chafey partner chemistry as the detectives trying to figure out what happened to Berge — or, really, who happened to him: straight-A student turned happy-ending masseuse Barbara Hoffman (Thora Birch); or her other fiancé, Jerry Davies (Brendan Sexton III, giving his usual lived-in performance). Or both.
The real Barbara Hoffman, whose trial for the murders of Berge and Davies was the first one to get the fully televised treatment, denied killing anyone, and refused to comment further or to submit herself for parole consideration; as far as I know, she remains silently incarcerated. It’s not entirely clear what Hoffman did or didn’t do — Ryan Menezes’s somewhat snarky case rundown for Cracked comes close to a workable explanation, IMO — and neither the script nor Birch’s performance speculates past what the case file says for sure. Here again, though, the uncertainty reads as hesitance — storytellers who see in the unknown not narrative potential, but anxiety or censure. If we already know the ending (we do; Winter starts there, so it’s not a spoiler), but then the film won’t take a position on the middle, and can’t settle on an overall tone, where’s the big idea? Forget “who’s driving”; is there even an engine?
I harp on the fact that the movie doesn’t seem proactive about its opacity because Thora Birch does seem proactive about hers in the Hoffman role. There’s a difference between impassivity as a choice and as not making one, and Birch is going with the former; she’s giving you as much as she can about a character who IRL has given history very little. The writing and pacing around her don’t match Birch’s compelling level of active blankness, and on top of that, the ambiguity around Birch’s capital-W Whole Deal in the intervening years intrudes into scenes where not much else is going on except psychological “room tone.” This bit of “trivia” from the Freevee menu, for instance:
As seen in the final cut, the scene is fairly brief, and expected; it doesn’t have much heft, given the agita that allegedly went into making it. But then Googling around brings you to a weird Guardian piece from 2014 in which Birch implies that she “disappeared” because Hollywood wanted to silence her…but it seems pretty clear, between the trivia snippet and another incident in the Guardian article, that her former-porn-actor “dad-ager” Jack interfered in/threatened to yank her out of at least one other production, so the vagueness around all of that leeches into Winter. Hoffman has a speech early on about misogyny and sex-work stereotypes that blurs those lines in a similar fashion, but it’s unclear how the film feels about the possibility that Hoffman is both victim and arbitrageur.
Winter isn’t bad. It isn’t too long. It does a few interesting things, although those things can feel like they’re competing with one another. But the center doesn’t hold, because it doesn’t exist. There’s a way to make that sort of central unknowability magnetic; Winter can’t find it, and may not have tried to as hard as it could have. — SDB
This piece was originally published October 31, 2023.