It was Friday night and we were looking for some escape, a movie not too burdened with “meaning” or exotic cultures we’d have to keep our craniums warm for. That meant setting aside the three Turkish movies I’ve been planning to see.  Why not a survival story, perhaps with some love thrown in: a man and a woman in the Alaskan wilderness? I had just the ticket, something I’d found doing research after seeing the fine Turkish snow-survival movie, Journey of Hope.  Charles Martin Smith‘s American-Canadian  The Snow Walker turned out better than I had imagined it might be — and carried, along with  danger and adventure, both meaning and a look at another culture, not well known to us.

Charlie Halliday [Barry Pepper], a brash young, former WW II fighter pilot, is working out of Yellowknife, North West Territories, Canada as a bush-pilot, taking the wealthy out for hunting trips and doing a little black-market trading on the side.  Encountering a small summer fishing camp of Inuit he reluctantly agrees to take the comely but sick, Kanaalag [Annabella Piugattuk] to Yellowknife for her persistent cough.  The oil system of the small pontoon-fitted airplane over-pressures and blows out.  He has to make a perilous crash landing –after a series of spectacular “stone-skipping” jumps across tundra ponds– far, far from the world he knows.

Charlie, still full of himself, takes off on foot thinking he’ll walk 100 miles to somewhere, get a plane and come back and get the girl.  A week later, exhausted and harried almost to death by biting flies, he is rescued and nursed back to health by Kanaalag.  Slowly, she begins to teach him the ways of Inuit survival, and slowly he accepts that his ariplane knowledge is useless here, that he needs her, and the companionship growing between them.

The northern Canada scenery is incredibly beautiful, sometimes in a throat-gripping way.  Both actors, but particularly, Annabella Piugattuk, a first-timer chosen from among hundreds of native girls, are very good.  Her skill at native crafts, from making water-tight boots, to skinning a deer, both appear real in the movie, and from the very informative additional features of the DVD release, are real.  One of the things that attracted Smith to her was her real interest in the ways of her elders, not so common among her peers in 2002.

The interest and respect shown by Smith, following Mowat’s story, Walk Well My Brother,  and his script help, for native Inuit culture and skill is evident throughout.  Though there are long moments of spiritual attention,  Snow Walker is not trying as hard  to make a point as Dances with Wolves was in 1990.

I’d not read much Farley Mowat before seeing the movie. My sole literary knowledge of the snowy north was John McPhee’s wonderful Coming Into The Country, and Jon Krakauer’s less wonderful celebration of idiocy, Into the Wild, both set in Alaska, not Canada. It’s time to investigate Mowat’s vast output,   centered on the great Canadian wildness, of which he is also a long time protector, especially including the earlier converted to film, Never Cry Wolf, in which Charles Martin Smith played Mowat himself.

A very satisfying movie and one you can watch with pre-teens and above without embarassing them, or yourself.