Tribeca Film Fest, Day 3: "Deep Powder" and "Hide Your Smiling Faces"

Director: Mo Ogrodnik

Stars: Shiloh Fernandez, Haley Bennet, Josh Salatin, Colby Minifie, Logan Miller, Dana Eskelson

Running time: 91 minutes

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Score: 5/10

Deep Powder, the feature debut from NYC-based writer-director Mo Ogrodnik, is two films rolled into one, and one is much better than the other. The superior half comes first, an intimate and affecting work of generic but well-performed young love. Living in a snow-covered New England town, Danny (Shiloh Fernandez) works at a ski lift in order to save money, go to college, and play hockey, since his widowed mother doesn't make enough to send him to a university and take care of his two younger siblings. He's a working class, kind-hearted dude, a nice guy who gets blindsided by the beautiful, free-spirited Natasha (Haley Bennet), a privileged private school student whose snooty, similarly wealthy friends look down upon Danny's kind. Sparks fly, nonetheless.

Buoyed by strong performances from Fernandez and Bennet, Deep Powder nails the characters' intense romance. There's a melancholy atmosphere lends a poingnancy to their relationship, one that Ogrodnik captures sharply by offsetting their passionate interactions with surrounding forces that don't want them to make it. A scene in which Natasha plays one of Danny's late father's precious vinyl records, which his mother forbids anyone to touch, is indicative of their situation—as Natasha and Danny dance on his mother's bed to old-school rock, they feel untouchable, yet when his mom angrily breaks up the fun and kicks Natasha out of her house, the tragic nature of their connection brings them back to reality. Bennet's fragile, crushed reaction—a night-and-day switch from her character's typically self-confident demeanor—is a heartbreaker.

This is where Deep Powder is leading to all along, stuck with a "based on true events" angle that's driven home by grainy, VHS-quality confessionals from Danny's and Natasha's friends and family, not unlike the technique used in the 2006 teen crime drama Alpha Dog. When she's not spending time with Danny, Natasha is hanging out with her fellow members of the Deep Powder Alpine Country Club, a skiing society that's actually harboring an illegal secret: Once a year, they send two members down to South America to score cocaine. And, yes, that plot point feels just as random in the movie as it does here.

Deep Powder's transition into Blow territory is poorly established; not for one second do any of the students or Danny (whom Natasha brings along with her for the run) come across as kids who'd ever willingly take $35,000 down to Ecuador to negotiate drug deals with dangerous, non-English-speaking sellers. The damaging juxtaposition plays like the bizarre, unwanted mash-up of ABC Family characters and Traffic that's awkward as it's trying to be riveting. Nor is Ogrodnik able to stage the narcotic scenes with any palpable tension, and as Deep Powder heads towards its inevitably unpleasant conclusion, the intended impact is diluted. What starts off as an emotionally rich, above-average love story devolves into a strained and unconvincing tragedy.

Director: Daniel Patrick Carbone
Stars: Ryan Jones, Nathan Varnson, Colm O'Leary, Thomas Cruz, Christina Starbuck, Chris Kies
Running time: 80 minutes
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Score: 8/10

Death hovers all around first-time director Daniel Patrick Carbone's Hide Your Smiling Faces, a subdued and brooding coming-of-age film that strikes an impressive balance between darkness and tenderness.

The opening scene appropriately introduces what's at stake: Pre-teen Tommy (Ryan Jones) and a few of his buddies find a dead bird inside a rundown shed located within the woods that encircle their rural New Jersey homes. Rather than be repulsed by it, the kids move the bird's mouth in playful karaoke-styled singing and pretend that it's flying. To them, the concept of death isn't upsetting yet—they haven't experienced its destructive power in their own lives. In a different part of town, Tommy's older brother, Eric (Nathan Varnson), kills time with his own friends by aggressively wrestling each other in a sort of backwoods fight club. To them, pain is a rush and a rite of passage.

Hide Your Smiling Faces progresses with a worrying sense of dread. As the film grows more somber by the minute, one gets the feeling that Tommy and Eric could confront mortality firsthand at any given moment, and it's much to Carbone's credit that the film avoids any obvious narrative turns. Death starts to consume the two siblings, but not morbidly—it makes them grow up faster than they'd ever expected. For Tommy, Ian's angry father's constant threats towards the boy's dog compound with a pit of dead animals that he comes across in the forest; Eric, on the other hand, begrudgingly entertains Tristan's conversations about suicide and, since he's at that age, lashes out against his parents who, in his eyes, aren't trying to understand everything that he's going through.

With an acute sense of location conveyed by hauntingly still shots of landscape (props go to cinematographer Nick Bentgen), Carbone places viewers smack-dab into the kids' scenic yet isolated and one-dimensional world. There's seemingly little to do other than explore the woods, play-fight, and toy with birds' corpses; there's no reprieve from the unpleasantries surrounding them. Hide Your Smiling Faces isn't exactly a welcoming experience, but once you settle into its intentional bleakness, it's tough to shake off.