..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Doug Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Small towns are often romanticized and sentimentalized in the movies, turned into fantasies of good will and fond memories that sometimes make the consummately homey visions of painter Norman Rockwell look like the slashing works of a cynical satirist. David Gordon Green's Snow Angels takes the opposite course. It's nastier and more realistic, though, in the end, almost as poetic. There's a weird blend of melancholy and madness in this movie; Green plunges us into a doom-haunted, nerve-jangling family drama that suggests a soap opera veering into tabloid pathology and horror.

But, even as the violence and trauma begin to mount up here -- even as central character Glenn Marchand (Sam Rockwell), a gun nut and Jesus freak with a bent toward sado-masochism, begins to go crazier and crazier over beauteous, wary wife Annie (Kate Beckinsale) -- the move keeps a core of gentleness. Glenn may be one of the two or three worst humans Green has portrayed in his small-town epics, and this may be one of the director's saddest stories, but compassion is never fully absent from his canvas.

The source here is a novel by Stewart O'Nan and the story is told in flashback after an introverted teenager, Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano) hears two gunshots while the bandleader rants at his outdoor school band practice. That's the setup. Green ('George Washington) gives it to us with his usual mix of toughness and sensitivity. He's a director attracted to melodramatic subjects with a kink of violence, but he's also a rhapsodic observer of small town life and alienated youth. In a way, Glenn --who survived a suicide attempt and now misperceives himself as somehow blessed by God -- is a childish, murderous fallen angel, thrust out of paradise and his emotional immaturity into adult passions that consume him.

As Glenn keeps trying pathetically to reconcile with Annie, driving her further and further away in the process, you watch him with a horror not completely untinged by weird sympathy. He's a small town monster, one easy to spot, and bringing Jesus and God in on his craziness only heightens the chill.

The novel Snow Angels is set in Pennsylvania in the '70s, but the movie, laid in the present, has no specific locale. (It was shot in Nova Scotia.) The film's wintry backgrounds, somber forests and deceptively peaceful waters, are almost as lyrically rendered as the Southern climes of Green's and cinematographer Tim Orr's other films, but you don't quite feel the same intense connection. There is a strong link to these people however. Watching this harsh, but very human, tale of mad love, you get a sense of the real underlife of some small towns, of a suburban peace hovering on the lip of chaos.