REVIEWED - THE BIG WHITE: MARK Mylod, director of good British television and the appalling Ali G movie, was perhaps ill-advised to allow both Holly Hunter and Tim Blake Nelson into the cast of this fitful Alaskan comedy. The film's experiments in the aesthetics of snow already call to mind Fargo.
Misunderstandings over precisely whose body is in which grave suggest similar conundrums in Blood Simple. Putting Hunter and Blake Nelson, stars of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, before us only confirms the film's intentions to ape the work of the Coen Brothers.
As smart-alec indie crime comedies go, The Big White is not entirely without merit, but it feels seedily second-hand throughout.
Robin Williams, quieter than usual and therefore slightly less irritating, turns up as a travel agent with problems. His wife, played by an overly antsy Hunter, suffers from a version of Tourette's Syndrome - cute, charming - found more often in film scripts than medical textbooks.
Caring for her costs money, but Williams's business is drifting dangerously into the red. When he finds a body in a nearby dumpster, he decides to hack away its face, leave it at the bottom of a ravine and encourage the authorities to identify it as the remains of his missing brother. The resulting life-insurance payout will, he hopes, solve all problems. Sadly for Robin, Giovanni Ribisi's corporate investigator smells a rat.
The script by Collin Friesen does have an impressive order to it. Various storylines work their way about and around one another before coming together in a neat finale. But the forced quirkiness fast becomes tiresome. There are no jokes here that haven't been worked to greater effect in the films of a certain pair of siblings from Minnesota.
