THE SNOW WALKER

 

As The Snow Walker opens, it is 1953 and life has molded Charlie Halliday (Barry Pepper) into an arrogant and self-serving individual. When not working as a Canadian bush pilot, his time is spent at the local pub drinking with friends and maintaining a non-committed relationship with one of the bar’s waitresses. He resides in the Northern Territories province of Upper Canada and his contempt for the local indigenous Inuit population doesn’t prevent him from exploiting them for his personal financial gain through side hustles, delivering and selling supplies. These personal endeavors, using one of the planes from his workplace, are overlooked by his employer, Shepherd (James Cromwell).

On a particular flight, Charlie encounters a small group of Inuit who implore him to help them. One of the Inuit, a young girl, is sick and they want him to fly her to the hospital back in his town. Charlie suspects the girl has tuberculosis and initially refuses. When the Inuit offer to pay him with valuable walrus tusks, Charlie reluctantly agrees to take her with him. Soon after taking back to the skies, Charlie’s plane experiences engine problems and it crashes down in one of the lakes of the huge Canadian tundra. Though both Charlie and his passenger survive, the plane is disabled, and the radio no longer works. He is miles away from where his flight was charted to be, and he realizes that any type of search by his company will never find him. By his estimation, he is hundreds of miles from any town. He leaves his passenger with a small amount of the supplies that he had on the plane and sets off to find help on his own.

It soon becomes apparent that Charlie is desperately unprepared for the harsh terrain he decides to traverse. After a battle with swarms of mosquitoes, Charlie succumbs to his environment. He recovers only through the assistance of Kanaalaq (Annabella Piugattuk), the sick girl he thought he had left behind. Over the next three months, Charlie and Kanaalaq learn to communicate and rely on each other for survival. A true friendship develops between the two, and we experience Charlie’s journey of finding, or perhaps simply reestablishing, his sense of purpose and humanity. 

The filming of the barren, rocky, and lake-filled expanse of upper Canada is both breathtaking and overwhelming. Director Charles Martin Smith’s exploration of this beautiful yet deadly territory is just one of the reasons this film is worth viewing. The story itself is a simple, yet necessary one. This planet is something we all share, and we only succeed when we learn to appreciate all its people, not just those like us. Early in the movie, we see that the Canadian government had forced all the indigenous peoples to wear tags with numbers on them. This is a sad bit of true Canadian history and a practice that continued into the late nineteen-seventies. You see, it was simply too difficult for the white settlers to learn to pronounce native names. A blaring example of white privilege and the dehumanizing of “others” that sadly continues to this day through other forms of equally intentional negations of history and accomplishments of non-whites in Western culture.

This film would be the first acting experience for Annabella Piugattuk. She was a native Inuit teenager who grew up in the Northwest Territories and had vast knowledge of Inuit life and tradition. Her portrayal is delightful as she unfolds the contrasts between her character’s experience and innocence at the same time. Her chemistry with Pepper is charming, and his portrayal of Charlie is top-notch. The story of Charlie’s blossoming into a better man and better person is enhanced by the fact that the relationship between Charlie and Kanaalaq remains entirely platonic and one of mutual respect. The Snow Walker was an uplifting and entirely enjoyable experience.