/Can anyone tell me why the film was given this title? All or most of the story took place in warm months. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year./I mostly enjoyed this movie and its acting, and was charmed during most of the movie by the director's use of silence. Much of the emotion came just from the actors' expressions, glances, restraint. But after 80 minutes or so of restraint, I wished to God someone, anyone, would open his/her yap and speak true feelings, as well as some revealing dialog. /I can appreciate slice-of-life movies that lack a neatly tied bow at the end, but this one felt truncated to me. I wanted to know much more than we were told. Where was the setting of the film? Where was Allison Janney's "real" home?/Are there really entire families that substitute "hey" for all other forms of greeting, such as hello, hi, how are you, good morning?

What happens when a spouse dies? There are no tender flashbacks in this film showing the husband and wife in their marital bliss before the wife dies. This film is about what happens afterward. Even five years later, the reverberations are being felt by the husband and his two young adult sons.Keep your expectations realistic, and this film delivers. In a key scene, a high school history teacher asks the class, "Why did the Mongols turn back when they were poised to roll up Europe like a carpet?" Pete, the younger son, seems to know, but doesn't care to answer. The teacher offers to let him out of class (a makeup summer class) if he can answer.Pete finally takes the bait: "Their leader died and they didn't know what to do." There you have it. Does the filmmaker do any more to explain what troubles this family? Yes, but you have to put the pieces together yourself. He doesn't make it hard; he just doesn't grind it up and put it in a baby food jar.The film builds to some very touching scenes that explore the impact of loss on the three remaining family members. If you're interested in exploring how real people deal with the real issue of loss, you'll find something here.The ending comes before you want it to, sure. There are no easy answers offered by the conclusion, but that's the way life is.

Winter Solstice tries hard. It really does.It pretends to be a "meditation" on family life, but it fails miserably...what it offers is 90 minutes worth of poorly scripted and shabbily edited material (if you do see this film, check out the boom microphones floating at the top of the screen...I laughed out loud: it was awesome!) The actors did a great job considering the lack of material they had to work with; unfortunately, they could do no better than trudge through a painfully shallow storyline, which, for even the most patient film viewer, is SUPER FRUSTRATING.Save your cash and scold your local theatre houses for charging people to see this rubbish. Shame on them!

As metaphors go towards reflecting character, this one is a good as it gets: Gardens "fall apart pretty quickly, and you have to take care of them." In Winter Solstice, Jim Winters' (Anthony LaPaglia) family needs plenty of care as it recovers from the loss of his wife and the two boys' mother. That piece of debut writer/director Josh Sternfield's dialog is reminiscent of Miles' discourse about pinot noir in Sideways--T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative" describes the state of the characters.In the Seinfeld mode, but without the humor, Winter Solstice is about nothing; little happens to set up traditional Greek rising and falling actions. It is profoundly about getting through without letting mom's death freeze you in sorrow. That older son Gabe (Aaron Stanford) plans to leave New Jersey for Florida is just another disappointment. That son Pete (Mark Webber) is a summer school regular hiding a bright mind must be endured until he emerges from his winter.Jim does as well as can be expected keeping his family whole. As for himself, his landscaping business keep him alive with the artistic promise of more beautiful flowers and the humanistic comfort of working with people and getting to know new temporary neighbor, Molly Ripkin (Allison Janney).The simplicity of the days coupled with the minimalism of dialog and plot defines this small movie, which executive produce LaPaglia must have known wouldn't make any money. But he made it, as he did the estimable Lantana, for reasons that may be tied to the garden analogy, taking care to be more than a TV star. As Gabe says about leaving his fine girlfriend behind, "That's my problem, and I'm dealing with it." I admire father, son, and director's ideals—they give us interesting small films such as Winter Solstice. As Shakespeare's Richard says in King Henry VI, Part iii, "I, that did never weep, now melt with woe/That winter should cut off spring-time so."