Like Thomas Jane or Peter Facinelli, Barry Pepper is one of those quirkily handsome types that Hollywood producers can't figure out what to do with, though they know they should keep trying. To date, Pepper has done his best work in made-for-TV or indie projects. He was terrific as a cynical market analyst in 25th Hour and as a morose Roger Maris in 61* (opposite Jane), and now he anchors Charles Martin Smith's The Snow Walker, an adaptation of Farley Mowat's short story "Walk Well, My Brother." Smith, who starred in Carroll Ballard's 1983 version of Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, relies on wordless scenes of Pepper making his way across the Canadian arctic, and his star holds the center of the frame with an anxious-but-determined expression.
Pepper plays a self-centered '50s seaplane pilot who makes a deal with some Eskimos to transport a sick woman (Annabella Piugattuk) to a hospital. But then an engine blows, and Pepper's plane goes down in the tundra, 200 miles from any settlement. Pepper's cohorts, who know his reputation for having mistresses stashed across the country, initially assume that he's off on a bender, and by the time they initiate a search, Pepper has scrambled deeper into the wilderness with a coughing Piugattuk in tow.
As Piugattuk passes along tips for hunting and fishing to an initially skeptical Pepper, the film develops into an overly maudlin "look what we can learn from these natives" morality play, but the core of the story—the survivalist adventure—outlasts the patronizing lessons, because of the inherent fascination of watching two people use their wits to overcome the elements. The Snow Walker lacks Never Cry Wolf's primal poetry, but it's hard to make the tundra look anything other than beautiful, and Smith smartly holds long shots of icy lakes and northern lights. And it helps to have Pepper, with his Martin Sheen/James Dean passionate cool, facing a barren landscape by strapping on his walking boots and heading for the hills.