“Remains wholly unsatisfying because its main character is so aggravating, underwritten, and underdeveloped”

In some ways, the 1990s and early 2000s may have been more similar to the 1950s than to today. And no, I don’t mean in terms of how technology has changed or how interconnected our society has become. I mean in terms of the ways gay and queer people navigated society. As I grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, it was still a terribly difficult time to come out. Even more developed countries continued to hold aggressively anti-gay attitudes and had laws designed to limit or prevent rights and equality of gay people. Meanwhile, society itself wasn’t tolerant. Sure, some television shows and films were finally beginning to show the mere existence of gay people, but equality and acceptance still felt far away. It was terribly difficult for me to come out, more so than I would imagine it being for someone growing up in today’s digital age, when gay and queer people are much more widely accepted.

In Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter, playing in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Special Presentations section, Haigh tells the story of Mike (Fred Hechinger), a young man living in Colorado during the 1950s who must navigate and hide his sexuality. This is not new thematic territory for Haigh, who previously directed the Oscar-nominated 45 Years, Lean on Pete, as well as the tremendous films Weekend and All of Us Strangers, which both explore the struggles and trauma of gay men. Weekend is particularly notable for its time, being a major film to honestly portray the modern gay experience when it was released in 2011. In A Long Winter, however, Haigh does not reach the heights of either of those tow films. Instead, he has created a rather frustrating film in which his characters remain mostly underdeveloped and frustratingly stupid.

While Mike’s sexuality is certainly at the core of the film, the story centers around the disappearance of his mother, Louise (Caitríona Balfe). Mike lives with his mother, his father Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and brother Tommy (Kit Connor) in a mountainous area of Colorado. Louise is an alcoholic who attempts to hide her drinking from Mike. Mike believes no one in the family is aware of her alcoholism, and he truly does not understand her condition. Meanwhile, Tommy sets off for Korea, leaving Mike with his parents as winter sets in. Lester confronts Louise about her drinking problem and throws away all the alcohol in the home while leaving Louise confined inside. Because of this, Louise leaves shortly before a blizzard, presumably to get more to drink or simply because she has become dissatisfied with her life.

One of the major problems with the film is that Mike is simply a stupid character. He is a mama’s boy, a very archetypal presentation of a gay man-child, who appears to believe that almost everything his mother does is good. He seems willing to do almost anything she asks, and he even begs his father to give her more alcohol. He blames his father for Louise leaving the house because he would not simply let her have what she wanted – the alcohol. He clearly does not understand alcoholism and apparently never even noticed that his mother had a problem before. This is coupled with scenes later in the film in which Mike’s character comes across as simply plain dumb. It is difficult to make for a compelling story when the main character remains both uninteresting and irritating.

On top of this, there is a scene later in the film in which Mike enters Louise’s bedroom and begins looking through her women’s magazines and touching her feminine personal effects. For a moment, it brings flashes of the scenes in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, where Eddie Redmayne’s character seemingly touches women’s clothing and experiences a sexual awakening. Thankfully, Haigh’s shots in this scene are nowhere near the same absurdity as those in Hooper’s film, but it begins to approach that territory.

Still, there are some significant highlights in the film. The performances, particularly those by Caitríona Balfe and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, are strong, if not superb. The cinematography by André Turpin is full of captivating long tracking shots and zoom-outs. Haigh and Turpin also make beautiful use of natural lighting to capture the colors and authenticity of the period. Turpin’s camera is also able to exquisitely capture the beautiful vistas of the snowfall and mountains.

And importantly, the film does highlight the ways in which gay people had to hide themselves during this period and how that feeling permeated for decades. There are parts of the film where characters call other people “communist fairies” in front of Mike. I vividly remember my family constantly using anti-gay slurs in front of me and having deeply negative feelings toward gay people. Just as in Mike’s case, these sentiments made it harder for me to come out and pushed people further into the closet. And it is even more difficult for those in Mike’s position, with such unyielding commitment to his mother, to risk disappointing family members and potentially being exiled from their families.

Ultimately, Andrew Haigh’s film is a mixed bag that remains wholly unsatisfying because its main character is so aggravating, underwritten, and underdeveloped. The cinematography, strong performances, and themes provide highlights, but none of these are enough to overcome the fundamental problems with the writing and the characters. A Long Winter has the pieces of a compelling film, but Haigh never brings them together in a satisfying or meaningful way.