Blu-ray Review: Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter on the Criterion Collection

The late Joan Micklin Silver’s star continues to rise thanks to Criterion.

Chilly Scenes of WinterIt’s an odd stroke of timing that the Criterion Collection’s edition of Chilly Scenes of Winter would be released almost the exact same day that critic Karina Longworth kicked off her You Must Remember This podcast’s much-anticipated series on the disappearance of the modern American erotic movie. Joan Micklin Silver’s beloved cult classic isn’t particularly “erotic,” in the traditional sense of the word, but like the films that Longworth features in her series, it plays in our current climate like some bizarre, alien signal from an entirely lost era. An era in which the human condition could be presented as messy, mercurial, and outside of clearly delineated notions of nobility and cowardice. Micklin Silver’s humble PG-rated romantic dramedy is, in its brisk 95 minutes, a more adult entertainment than nearly any studio-backed film you could name from the past decade or so.

Adapted from novelist Ann Beattie’s book of the same title and set in an almost comically dreary Salt Lake City winter, Chilly Scenes of Winter centers mainly around the romantic obsession that Charles (John Heard) has for a co-worker, Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), who’s unhappily married and, at the time of their meet cute, living apart from her husband. Presented in chronologically fragmented fashion (shades of Annie Hall), the film depicts how Charles spends his days replaying every nook and cranny of the two-month-long affair that he and Laura indulged, torturing himself wondering how Laura could choose to ultimately return home to her husband, Ox (Mark Metcalf, one of the three actors who served as the film’s producers).

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Charles’s near-Proustian existentialism isn’t lost on his friend and roommate, Sam (Peter Riegert), his lovelorn secretary, Betty (Nora Heflin), and the blind vendor (Allen Joseph) in his office building’s lobby. Every evening, as he chooses a piece of candy to eat away his feelings, the vendor’s query (“What do you have?”) seems to reopen the wound of Charles’s heartache.

And yet, even though Chilly Scenes of Winter’s ostensible subjectivity is given over to Charles—who occasionally breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience and whose inner monologue peppers the soundtrack—the film’s point of view is unmistakably far more dubious of Charles’s legitimacy as the hero of his own story. Throughout, Micklin Silver expertly transposes Beattie’s skepticism for her characters into a remarkably organic and alive depiction of the foibles of human behavior. It’s hard to miss the fact that, even in his own flashbacks, Charles’s repeated entreaties of “I love you” are never answered by Laura.

A less perceptive writer-director would leave it at that, but Micklin Silver dives far deeper into the volatility of both Charles’s thwarted male psyche as well as Laura’s opportunistic passivity. As possessively blinkered as Charles is from the jump, Laura’s insistence that he cease thinking so highly of her—that, in fact, she’s a bad person for leaving her loving husband in the lurch—can only partially disguise her cashing in on the convenience of leaving all her options open.

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When Laura attempts to clear some space for herself, Charles amps up the cling factor by sarcastically announcing that he’s going to spend his Saturday nights playing poker with the boys, when he clearly has no intention of spending a single moment away from her. When she refuses to let him take her to her gynecological checkup, he suggests that she’s cheating on him, and jovially announces his intentions to beat up both her and her gynecologist. It’s a joke, he insists, but there’s little mistaking the aggression wrapped up in his courtship, especially when she tells him that it’s over between them and he emptily promises, “I’m going to rape you.”

Imagine any of this flying today without the sort of double-underlined actorly violence that, for instance, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling brought to Blue Valentine, a heightened sensibility that gives audiences the easy opportunity to tut over the tragedy of their mutually assured victimhood. That’s not what Micklin Silver brings to her portrait, and it’s certainly not what the miraculous Heard and Hurt bring to their expertly calibrated performances.

Heard, who Micklin Silver and her producers (which also included Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne) tailored the role around, is a revelation as Charles, a boy-man wired to be incapable of anything other than smarmily self-assured in spite of being raised in the throes of a societal “is that all there is” movement, as well as too driven by masculine instinct to be mired in cognitive dissonance over any of it. As for Hurt’s Laura, she’s every bit as lived-in, a portrait of a woman willfully occupying the grey zone between comfort and independence.

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Micklin Silver was famously urged to film a happy ending for Chilly Scenes of Winter that mirrored that of the book she was adapting, one which she thought didn’t do justice to her film’s overall tone or, indeed, how stories like Charles’s and Laura’s would usually end in real life. Then she watched as her film opened and closed without so much as a ripple. When she was a few years later given the chance to present it with the more downbeat, open-ended original ending, the rerelease was an unlikely hit. Again, imagine that happening today.

Image/Sound

This isn’t the first time that Chilly Scenes of Winter has been issued on Blu-ray, as this release follows a Twilight Time edition that’s only six years old. But nonetheless, Criterion pushed forward with a fresh 4K digital transfer. I can’t say it looks radically better than the earlier edition, but it does feel like its image is both sharper and more appropriately wintry in its color timing. Interior scenes present the glorious despair of late-’70s design and fashion as it existed in mid-sized, non-coastal U.S. cities with unsparing veracity, which is to say that they provide warmth in contrast with the cold, wet darkness of the exteriors. The monaural soundtrack is balanced without being assertive, though I will admit that I did have to rewind a few moments of dialogue to catch what was being said. One omission from Criterion’s edition, compared to Twilight Time’s, was the presentation of Ken Lauber’s pop-jazz score in isolation. I’d have jumped at the chance to tip back a Harvey Wallbanger to those sax riffs.

Extras

An even more lamentable loss is the commentary track that Joan Micklin Silver and producer Amy Robinson recorded for Twilight Time’s disc. Instead, Criterion presents a trio of featurettes spanning the decades. The oldest is Katja Raganelli’s mini-documentary Joan Micklin Silver: Encounters with the New York Director. It offers a look at her career from Hester Street through Chilly Scenes of Winter, with stops at Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Between the Lines. The doc also features an extensive interview with Carol Kane, who was Oscar-nominated for Hester Street, and plenty of footage of the director herself in the full bloom of her career.

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The next featurette fast forwards about 25 years, as Micklin Silver sat for an interview for the DGA’s Visual History series. In this 15-minute clip, she looks back at her career with an increased sense of perspective, both in the opportunities she was given and her sense of youthful determinism. She says that, egotistical though it might sound, it was seeing Pather Panchali that made her realize that’s what she wanted to do, and that she in fact already knew how.

Rounding things out is a new, 30-minute discussion with the three producers, who fill in the gaps on how the film came to be, its relationship to United Artists at the time, and how the three of them had a Jules and Jim thing going for a while. Criterion also includes the original “happy” ending for comparison. For what it is, it’s not exactly bad (Heard and Hurt make it work), but it’s definitely a mismatch with the rest of the film. Finally, scholar Shonni Enelow turns in a deft booklet essay that delves into the heart of Charles and Laura’s representation then and now.

Overall

Coming from an era where female directors weren’t the rule, and barely even the exception, the late Joan Micklin Silver’s star continues to rise. And Criterion prudently jumped on what is widely recognized as her wise, thorny masterpiece.

Score: 
 Cast: John Heard, Mary Beth Hurt, Peter Riegert, Frances Bay, Kenneth McMillan, Griffin Dunne, Gloria Grahame, Alex Johnson, Nora Heflin  Director: Joan Micklin Silver  Screenwriter: Joan Micklin Silver  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1979  Release Date: March 28, 2023  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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