The Winter Guest

A Phoenix pick

For all that it can slide from the precise to the precious, Alan Rickman's The Winter Guest is an auspicious directorial debut. Having great actors on hand and having a great actor's intuition in directing them is a big factor, as is the bleakly stunning setting -- a desolate Scottish coastal town on winter's day so cold the sea has frozen (The Winter Guest favors the pathetic fallacy).

Rickman deftly follows the sometimes intersecting paths of four sets of characters. Widow Frances (Emma Thompson) and her mother, Elspeth (Thompson's real-life mother, Phyllida Law), stroll the lunar desolation of the town, discussing her loss, her plans, and her new haircut (mom approves only of the first). Meanwhile Thompson's son Alex and hoydenish colleen Nita meet on the street and gravitate to a hot bath and a warm fireplace. Twelve-year-old schoolboys Tom and Sam discuss penis enlargement and the futility of life on the blank shoreline. And a pair of elderly women, Lily and Chloe, take a bus to a funeral -- their idea of a good time. Although at times portentous, The Winter Guest always shudders back to life with hearty, sometimes caustic humor or coolly observed pathos, and Thompson and Law have the mother/daughter thing down so well it's almost annoying. Screens at the Kendall Square Thursday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. and Friday at 2 and 4:15 p.m. Director Alan Rickman will appear before tonight's 7 p.m. showing.

-- Peter Keough

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