Parents' Guide to It Snows All the Time

Hover's drama about his own family's struggle with Frontotemporal dementia is all heart, but unfortunately it demonstrates no filmmaking skill. The story is heartrending but lacks any emotional impact. Instead, it feels like an industrial video, teaching viewers about a subject through a story instead of just offering dry facts. Moreover, the facts about the condition could've been pulled from a WebMD page: There's nothing available here that isn't from the first listing of an internet search on the subject.

While it's kind of astonishing that three people took a stab at this script and this was the best they came up with, it's absolutely believable that It Snows All the Time captures, moment by moment, what really happened to Hover, from his perspective. For instance, the siblings of his character, Jesse, squabble, while he seems to be the perfect son. Jesse's Los Angeles live-in love seems to exist only to prove that Jesse (aka Hover) has a hot girlfriend, and he's shown at work once so we can hear his boss tell him what a star he is. Jesse is also shown coming to the defense of his ex-girlfriend (Taryn Manning), the one he left behind in Omaha and who seems pretty capable of handling herself, by punching out a drunk man who grabs her rear end. The film almost feels like a highlight reel of Jesse's favorite moments in life, rather than including details that actually pertain to the story of a father who gets early-onset dementia. It Snows All the Time isn't the first film to cover the challenges of a neurological condition, but others are told so much better and are much more memorable.