Snow Cake

Why isn't Alan Rickman in more movies? Maybe that's not quite the point. Perhaps it's a good thing that his projects are so carefully chosen and independent rather than mainstream. It's just that whenever I see him give an incredible performance like this I always have to wonder why I haven't been watching him more.

I've loved him from the day I first saw him play Hans in "Diehard." Right up until he fell to his death from over a hundred stories up, Alan Rickman was giving the kind of solid performance rarely seen in a big budget action movie. And it didn't end there. There was his role as a ghost coming back to haunt his grieving widowed wife in "Truly Madly Deeply" and as Sinclair, a well to do British business man who suspects that his wife maybe be cheating on him with her brother in "Close My Eyes." And then of course there are the Harry Potter movies where he plays what I can only guess is a warlock? I wouldn't know. I've never seen or read anything about Harry Potter. Maybe I should.

Subtle, dry humored, intense, clever, irreverent and compassionate: Rickman has always been interesting to watch. I feel that being typecast as a villain has always given Alan's performances an air of nefariousness not entirely his own. Yet, ironically, he is also able to evoke some of the most genuinely tender moments in film I have ever seen.

In "Snow Cake" he plays a man running away from his past only to slam right into it again by way of a terrible car accident on his way to Winnipeg to meet a friend. Sigourney Weaver gives a brilliant performance as the autistic mother of the young girl he meets and knows briefly before she is killed in the car accident.

It's hard to peg Alan Rickman. Not super masculine or even speculatively effeminate, but somehow his comfort in his own skin as he gets older, his ease with awkwardness and his choice to take roles that challenge rather than merely entertain the viewer has always made him one of my favorite actors.

I saw him once at a taping of "Def Poetry Jam." He was filming the HBO movie "Something The Lord Made" with Mos Def who was hosting at the time. He was sitting in the upper tier right behind me so I had to turn and crane my neck to get a look when Mos introduced him. That was over five years ago. His hair was already graying and it looked fabulous. I would have been looking at him the whole time if I could have. : )