WINTER OF FROZEN DREAMS (2009) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Eric Mandelbaum
Thora Birch, Keith Carradine, Brendan Sexton III,
Dan Moran, Scott Cohen, Dean Winters
A true crime story set in Madison, Wisconsin, where in the late 1970s, a woman named Barbara Hoffman apparently killed two men by dosing them with cyanide. Hoffman, a prostitute and biochemistry student, was engaged to both men, who had made her the sole beneficiary of their estates, and (more significantly) their life insurance policies. Thora Birch plays Hoffman, and she's a good actress, but it's hard to get a bead on Hoffman from either the script or Birch's performance. She's a cipher, a blank-faced femme fatale in a frozen, dysfunctional universe. Trying to build the case against her are a crotchety police detective (Keith Carradine) and his rookie partner (Scott Cohen), whose easy, joking banter accounts for the movie's only believable relationship. Carradine, especially, with his pipe and fedora, looks like he should be nosing around in a Coen brothers film. But for all the snow on the ground, this is no "Fargo", and Schenectady, New York, where the picture was shot, is no Madison, Wisconsin. Which leaves the whole thing feeling a little disembodied, a place-specific story cut off from its own geography. It's not entirely clear what her victims saw in Barbara Hoffman, either. But it is clear that these were not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
