Shopping Cart
The Winter Guest
Few films capture any of life’s stages with the intensity, insight, and attention to detail with which The Winter Guest captures them all--youth, middle age, and old age (as well as the connections and misconnections between them). We follow four sets of characters on a magical winter’s day in a seaside Scottish town. Each pair struggles to keep warm, vital, and connected by caring for each other and by keeping death (The Winter Guest) at bay.
Two barely pubescent boys (one is still waiting for his “balls to drop”) play hooky, hilariously bewail their boring, repressive fates, and then take off across the frozen sea, defying death, turning their backs on childhood, and launching themselves into adolescence and young adulthood.
A young man and a young woman turn a snowball fight into an elaborate courting ritual and then achingly discover the beauty and complexity of sexual attraction, but only after the young woman has helped the young man to put the death of his father behind him.
Two aging sisters fill their lives by combining funerals and sweet treats (“You need a treat after a cremation!”) until one of them panics, sensing her own death, and the other offers “undying” support.
The lead pair, a recent widow (the young man’s mother) and her aging mother, struggle to help each other—the daughter must return to life, love, and work; the mother, in her mid-seventies, must admit to her own vulnerability and dependence. Eventually, they discover that letting yourself be helped is even more difficult—and important.
We identify with each of these “couples” because their age-specific struggles—the search for identity, the awakening of love, the management of grief, and the fear of decline and death—are both universally recognizable and brilliantly realized. We are made to feel both young and old at the same time, immersed in each quest but also aware that it is but a part of the same longer journey--and continuing struggle against The Winter Guest.
This in itself is a remarkable achievement, but The Winter Guest has even more magic to perform. Because the central pair is intergenerational, and Ms Law (Elspeth) is the film’s framing character as well as the only one who interacts with all the others, the film develops yet another enriching perspective.
We come to feel, along with Elspeth, the cost (and the value) of a vital and connected old age. To achieve it, and for Elspeth it is obviously a struggle, we must ask for help and be willing to give it. We must lament the passing of youth but no longer resent it; we must change our fear of dependence into an acceptance of interdependence, and we must never lose sympathy and respect for the young and the middle aged—even when they seem too wrapped up in their own problems to listen to ours.
This is not to say that Elspeth is in any way a sweet old lady or even a manageable mother. To the contrary, her interactions with her daughter suggest that she is more outrageous than lovable, that the middle aged must also play a vital and forgiving role if we are to open a new and more honest dialogue between them and the old. Neither mother or daughter has the final answer, and The Winter Guest will obviously win out in the end, but both, through their love and understanding, have come, at least temporarily, in from the cold.