The Big White film review

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THE BIG WHITE

An ensemble comedy that never quite reaches the heights it would like to, The Big White is a quirky little film with a well-known cast that has much to like about it, but one which fails to leave much of a lasting impression. It's a less funny and less intelligent version of Fargo, a film with which it shares not only a bleak, snowy backdrop but an intricate scam as its central storyline.

The things to like about it are its setting (Alaska) and several of its performances, notably Robin Williams and Holly Hunter as Paul and Margaret Barnell, the dysfunctional central couple: he the proprietor of an ailing travel business, and she a housebound sufferer of Tourette's syndrome. In order to escape the financial meltdown he inevitably faces, Paul comes up with a ruse to fake the death of his long-lost brother and to cash in on his insurance policy.

Paul's quest is made easier when he conveniently stumbles across a dead body in the trash outside his office. But several characters make his dodgy claim all the more difficult: a camp killer (Tim Blake Nelson) and his cohort, intent on finding the body they accidentally dumped, a suspicious insurance clerk (Giovanni Ribisi) facing an early midlife crisis and worst of all, the brother himself (Woody Harrelson) who having heard of the wheeze returns home to claim his part of his own payout.

Director Mark Mylod (Ali G IndaHouse) makes an impressive American debut here with a gentle film that relies on its characters for the laughs. Hunter's Margaret provides most of them, it has to be said, but we're to be grateful for the fact that this is a Robin Williams film where the comedian delivers one of his more restrained performances.

If anything, the chief criticism is perhaps that the whole thing is a little too restrained. While the natural landscape provides much for the camera to capture, the plot does tie itself up as the climax approaches so that both the comedy and the intrigue have less of an effect. But as a character comedy it's a success, albeit on a limited scale.

Paul Hurley