WINTER'S BONE / THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Dir. Debra Granik US 2010

Dir. Lisa Cholodenko US 2010

There's a lot to work with when comparing these two films. I watched them both as part of my Oscar catch-up (making me 8 for 10 on Best Picture noms). Odds are that neither would have been nominated if the Academy were still operating under the 5 film structure. Both feature nominated Best Actress and Supporting Actor performances. Both were directed by women. Both are about (in their own very different ways) the importance of family and the difficulties therein.

I watched Winter's Bone at a pretty interesting point in my life, in terms of what I'm watching and reading. I'd just finished my second viewing of The Wire a week or so before I saw it. Later that night I watched the second season premiere of Justified. And just this past week I re-read all my issues of Scalped, my current favorite comic book from Vertigo. All four of these works deal with American communities functioning in abject poverty, places where the drug trade, substance abuse and violence run rampant. Places with their own cultures and codes and lifestyles. Justified even takes place in roughly the same area of the country as Winter's Bone (Harlan, Kentucky and the rural Missouri, respectively). Winter's Bone seems like an easy contender for the most realistic of the four (with The Wire probably being a close second), and it's definitely the most meditative. Structured loosely as a detective story (much of what I've read about it calls it a noir, although I don't totally agree with that), Winter's Bone is at its core a story about a girl who must endure the hell that is her extended family for the sake of saving her immediate family.

Jennifer Lawrence (Best Actor nom) stars as Ree Dolly, a 17-year old girl living in the wooded mountains of Missouri. Having dropped out of high school in order to care for her younger siblings and her mentally-disturbed mother, Ree's efforts are further complicated when she discovers that her father, who cooks meth for a living, skipped his court hearing after posting their home as collateral. Facing eviction within the week, Ree descends into a world of crime and violence in order to find her father and save what's left of her family.

Winter's Bone does a lot with very little. The dialogue is sparse and to the point. Other than Ree, the characters are vague sketches left to be filled in by a cast of weathered-looking and very effective character actors. The camerawork and editing are minimal as well, much of the mood being set by the chilly cinematography and the drab landscape. More than anything, Winter's Bone is a mood piece, the simple plot merely acting as a towline for the audience as they are dragged through a dark corner of America.

Within the plot itself, the more is less approach applies as well. Despite there being almost zero onscreen violence in the film, the threat of violence in the film is almost omnipresent. Nearly every character Ree encounters is willing to do her harm if it serves there interest, and unlike the protagonist of a detective novel (who would most likely be in the same situation), Ree is never afforded any means of protecting herself. Her willpower alone fuels both her character and the plot.

Lawrence herself, in her first leading role, plays along with the film's aesthetic; her voice is muted but clear, her reactions solid and measured. The believability of the entire film rests entirely on whether or not you believe that a 17-year old girl can be as hard, as determined and as savvy as Ree. The other nominated performance in this film is John Hawkes, who plays Ree's dangerous uncle, Teardrop. It was pretty wild to see Hawkes get an Oscar nomination, I have to say. I've been a fan of his since Deadwood and its nice to see someone doing so much solid character work get the recognition. Teardrop is definitely a departure for Hawkes, who manages to exude a gloomy, world-weary menace despite his thin frame and short stature. There's a scene toward the end of the film between him and the local sheriff (played by Garrett Dillahunt, another great Deadwood alum), that kept me on the edge of my seat despite being extremely underplayed by Hawkes. Neither Lawrence nor Hawkes have a chance in their respective categories at the Oscars, but I'm sure they appreciate the thought.

As for the movie as a whole, my feelings toward it could best (and most obnoxiously) be described as chilly. The premise and the execution are all solid, but by the end of the film I still felt like I was still at arms length from all the characters, even Ree. The overwhelming bleakness of the film doesn't allow much room for humor (and rightly so), but moments of levity are ultimately the best device for generating sympathy for characters, and there is none to be found in this film. It's a fascinating world and flawlessly made on a technical level, but I don't know that it's something I'd ever want to revisit.

Speaking of levity. The Kids Are All Right. Following the unanimous praise the film received in the immediate wake of its release, I starting coming across a lot of backlash against the film, especially following its multiple Oscar nominations. I agree with a number of these criticism, which I'll get to, but on an emotional level, I felt a pretty strong disconnect from this film as well. Maybe I'm just dead inside.

So the movie is about a middle-aged lesbian couple Nic and Jules (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore; a more realistically hot middle-aged lesbian couple would be tough to come by), who each gave birth to one of their two kids via artificial insemination. Their kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutchinson) are now 18 and 16, and become curious about their biological father. They meet him without telling their moms and discover that he is a free-spirited hip(ster/pie) who owns an organic farm and rides a motorcycle (unsurprisingly, he's played by Mark Ruffalo). They all meet each other and heartfelt wackiness ensues.

One of the more common criticisms I heard about this film was that no one would have been that impressed if it had been about a straight couple. I'm inclined to agree. I'm grateful that the movie used only its broad premise to establish its quirky indie cred (other than a few details which varied in annoyance; the kids calling them 'the moms' was kind of charming, the son being named Laser, which is never explained, was pretty stupid). The characters are all well acted, but I really wasn't sure who I was supposed to be rooting for (among the three adults as least), and eventually ended up feeling ambivalent about their collective relationship(s). Benning and Moore have a natural chemistry together and the scenes between them where they're at peace, but their 'personality flaws' were a little too neatly drawn (Benning as the functioning alcoholic/control freak and Moore as the capricious, irresponsible one) and it made all the domestic drama a bit too predictable. Ruffalo's character felt a bit more real, mostly due to how increasingly despicable his actions become as the film progresses (although he was still fairly sympathetic by the end). His character arc is also left completely hanging, which I felt was a strange choice, but ultimately it does reinforce the familial bond between the other four characters, which is the point of the entire film.

I don't know how deserving any of the three adult leads are of their Oscar nominations. None of them are stretching themselves too far outside their comfort zone (not that you need to do that to deserve an Oscar), and the script was competent enough for it not to feel like they were carrying the movie entirely on their shoulders. I'm also not sure if its the fault of the marketing or the film itself that so much of the buzz revolved around its portrayal of a 'normal' gay family, but it does at times seem like its trying a bit too hard.

The Oscars are on tonight (it took me forever to post this review) and I don't see any of these films winning big (Annette Benning for Best Actress is probably the strongest possibility), but I'm glad I got to check them out beforehand. If I have time I may do a quick write-up of the ceremony in the next day or two. Other than that, I'm watched a pair of horror movies last week that I will hopefully get too soon.

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE / YOU & ME

Dir. Fritz Lang USA 1937

Dir. Fritz Lang USA 1938

My final cinema seminar at NYU was a comparative directors course on the work of Fritz Lang and Luis Bunuel. Both were prominent European directors who were forced out of their own countries and continued to make films in America (or Mexico in Bunuel's case). Both were know for their striking visual styles and incisive social commentary. Of the two, I vastly preferred Lang's angular expressionism and pulpy narratives to Bunuel's dreamy surrealism and bizarre storytelling devices. Although he will always be remembered (along with F.W. Murnau) as the pioneer of German Expressionism, Fritz Lang actually had a much lengthier career as a workhorse of the Hollywood studio system, directing one film a year from 1936 to 1957. These ran the gamut from social awareness pictures to crime dramas to westerns to noirs. Although the quality and importance of his American work varied, his auteurial stamp (bold, expressive shadows, shots of staring eyes, the steep price of vengeance, etc.) is clear, at least in all the examples I've seen. The Film Forum on Houston Street was showing a Lang in Hollywood series for the past few weeks and I caught a double feature at the tail end. I'd seen You Only Live Once in the aforementioned class. I was seeing You & Me for the first time.

You Only Live Once stars Henry Fonda as Eddie Taylor, a small time crook just released from prison with the assistance of his fiance Jo Graham (Sylvia Sydney) and her boss, a sympathetic city attorney (Barton MacLane). Despite his attempts to live honestly, Eddie finds himself framed for a bank robbery and facing the electric chair. Following a violent escape from prison, Eddie and Jo go on the lam, condemning themselves to a life of crime and violence on the road.

At a punchy 76 minutes (there's apparently a more violent 90 minute cut somewhere out there), You Only Live Once is narratively and structurally similar to Gun Crazy or, most obvioiusly, Bonnie And Clyde. But whereas the protagonists of those two films are genuine criminals and psychopaths, Eddie and Jo are simply good people pushed too far by circumstance and injustice. Despite its occassionally hokey plotting and some very on-the-nose dialogue (even by the standards of the era), the film does a good job of portraying many of the ills that normal people were forced to endure toward the end of the Great Depression (seriously, like, every ill you can imagine. The string of bad luck these two have strains even my generous credulity). The film pull as few punches as it's time allowed, featuring a number of scenes that would be bleak even by today's standards. Notable moments include Jo sucking milk from a punctured tin can, the two of them raising an infant in a bullet-riddled car and a pair of gas station attendees robbing the register and blaming it on them after they've stolen some gas and driven off.

Thematically, this film is very similar to Lang and Sydney's previous collaboration, 1936's Fury, which was also a powerful tract on the injustice suffered by individuals when they are faced with indifferent institutions and mob mentality. Sylvia Sydney is wonderful here as the wide-eyed, always encouraging Jo, who believes the best of Eddie and is willing to follow him into Hell with a naiveté and optomism that's always understandable and never annoying or ridiculous. Less impressive is Henry Fonda, who is more than capable when it comes to portraying Eddie as a desparing, down-on-his-luck shell of a man, but less convincing when he's required to appear dangerous or violent. I suppose that's the point ultimately, given that Eddie is by nature not dangerous or violent, but I found myself struggling to take him seriously whenever he was waving a gun around.

I was much more invested in You & Me, a film that addresses very similar issues, but does so with a bit more levity and charm. The film features George Raft and Sylvia Sydney as Joe and Helen, a pair of employees at a department store with a kindly manger (Harry Carey) who goes out of his way to hire reformed cons who have trouble finding work. One of these cons is Joe, a decent man with impulse control problems who manages to ground himself in a relationship with Helen. Initially told that they need to hid their marriage due to store policy, it is eventually revealed that Helen herself is an ex-con who knows that their marriage is a violation of both their paroles (is that still true? Seems kind of Draconian). While Joe begins to grow suspicious of Helen's behavior, he also finds himself being drawn back into a life of crime by his old gang members, who claim to be the only family he'll ever truely have.

It would be a stretch to call this film a comedy, but it features plenty of witty dialogue and doesn't really get serious until the back half. It also features two extremely bizarre pseudo-musical sequences that were very interesting, but felt extremely out of place in an otherwise grounded film. Beyond that though, I was pretty charmed by this film overall. It begins as a comedy of errors (of sorts) that seemlessly segues into an effective social drama without feeling tonally imbalanced. It's got a strong supporting cast and some clever dialogue, some of it a bit risque for the time (nothing like gregarious Jewish landladies for some inappropriate humor, amirite?)

What really sold this movie for me, however, was the pairing of George Raft and Sylvia Sydney. I've never been a huge George Raft fan, and this movie didn't quite convert me, but I was definitely the most enjoyable performance I've seen of his. Raft coasted for most of (if not all) his career by pretty much playing himself. Bogart and Cagney were able to fill same roles while having a lot more range as actors and thanks to bad career management and his own vanity, Raft popularity waned throughout the 40's while his fellow tough-guy actors went on to win Oscars (Raft actually inadvertantly launched Bogart to stardom by passing on the lead roles in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon). His role in this film allows him to stretch a bit, incorporating his usual act into a more broadly comedic role. Surprisingly, while I found his dramatic performance in the film to be a bit stiff, early scenes of him joking around with Sydney while having a night out on the town are some of the best in the whole movie. His personality bleeds into the performance to such a degree that some of the dialogue feels as though it might be ad-libbed (although that doesn't really seem like something Fritz Lang would have allowed).

Sylvia Sydney, who plays a very passive second to Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once, is given much more to work with in this film as a second protagonist alongside Raft. Savvier and more down-to-earth than Jo, Helen is a proactive, intelligent character and allows Sydney to play both the sexy flapper and the cute girl-next-door personas that she combined so well. She's rapidly overtaking Priscilla Lane as my favorite underrated early film actress.

I'm happy to finally be getting to the Film Forum on a semi-regular basis. Hopefully I'll be able to check out some other cool things in the coming months. The double features especially, are tailor made for this blog.

UP NEXT: Winter's Bone and The Kids Are Alright as part of my 2010 Oscar catchup.

APPALOOSA / THE FURIES

Dir. Ed Harris 2008 USA

Dir. Anthony Mann 1950 USA

Leave it to a pair of Westerns to get me back in the groove. Oddly enough, both of these films are fairly unconventional as Westerns go, but at least that gives me something to talk about.

Appaloosa is Ed Harris' sophomore directorial effort following 2000's Pollack. Based on a novel by crime writer Robert B. Parker, Appaloosa is the story of Virgil Cole (Harris) and his partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), a pair of gunslingers who roam the West and hire themselves out as law enforcement officers. They arrive at the titular New Mexican town in 1882 to find that the local sheriff has been murdered by a vicious rancher named Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) and his gang of thugs. Cole and Hitch's attempts to clean-up the town are stymied by the arrival of Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a mysterious widow with uncertain allegiances.

By my standards, all Westerns fall into one of three time periods, Classic (1903 to 1964), Revisionist (1964 to 1992) and Modern (1992 to present). Classic Westerns are your old school John Ford/John Wayne style films. Clear-cut good guys and bad guys, the usual stock characters and plots, basically the foundations of the genre. Revisionist Westerns begin and end with Clint Eastwood (A Fistful Of Dollars and Unforgiven to be specific). They introduce morally grey protagonists, shifting cultural dynamics and graphic, omnipresent violence. Both of these eras are fairly well defined, whereas the Modern Western remains a categorically murky classification that has yet to fully form. After Eastwood's Unforgiven became the final word in Revisionist Westerns, the genre remained stagnant for much of the 90's before a small resurgence in the middle of the last decade, mostly thanks to the success of the HBO series Deadwood. The films that followed in its wake (The Proposition, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and Seraphim Falls are what I would consider the stand-outs) were marked by fastitious attention to historical detail, sparse, yet measured storytelling and a minimalist (but still brutal) approach to violence.

So what makes Appoloosa such an oddball? The film features the plotting and sensibilities of a Classic Western (well-mannered characters, and a story featuring a hero, a villain and a love interest) combined with the visual aesthetic of a Modern Western. What little gunplay occurs in the film is over in a manner of seconds and the attention to detail is convincing and immersive. Ultimately however, this created a tonal imbalance that ended up bothering me for most of the film. And while I'm not opposed to a light-hearted Western, I found it difficult to take the film seriously as a whole.

Beyond the issues of genre, the movie is a mixed bag overall. Jeremy Irons is does an excellent job with the material he's given, but ended up feeling wasted. Renee Zellweger (who just bugs the crap out of me anyway) didn't seem to have a clear idea of how to play an admittedly difficult character. Allison French is duplicitious and sycophantic, and her relationship with Cole distracts from Cole's far more interesting relationship with Hitch. The character would have probably been a problem no matter what, but casting an actress I dislike in the role didn't help.

The characters of Cole and Hitch are interesting and well-drawn and Harris and Mortensen are extremely convincing in their portrayal of two guys who have been friends for so long that they're able to communicate their intentions and plans to each other in glances and nods. They're emotionally complex while still being consistent and reliable in their words and actions. You can read a lot of homosexual subtext into their relationship, but that actually makes it feel richer. You could also kill yourself with a drinking game based around all the instances of Hitch putting down and picking up his shotgun. I chalk that up to Viggo Mortensen being even cooler when insinuating violence than he is when committing it.

The Furies can really only be called a Western by virtue of it's setting (New Mexico again, but ten years earlier in 1872). It's actually more of a dynastic family drama with unusually impressive scenery. Known for a series of five Westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the early and mid-50's (Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur are the best ones, incase you care. Bend In The River is pretty good too.), Anthony Mann noted use of landscape to set the mood of his films is clearly present in The Furies. Unlike the Jimmy Stewart collaborations, which were shot in Technicolor, The Furies shadowy black and white cinematography does a excellent job of conveying the bleakness and dread that pervades the film.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Vance Jeffords, the daughter of ruthless, self-made cattle baron T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston in his last film role). While scheming to wrest the titular estate from her father, Vance falls in love with an awesomely named, but extremely shady gambler, Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey). Meanwhile, her father intends to marry a shrewd widow (man, you can't trust widows apparently) with her own designs on The Furies.

Although the film is almost two hours long, The Furies feels a bit like an epic that never quite got off the ground. There are a number of plot threads, several of which I left out of the recap above, and while nothing ever feels half-baked or cut-off, there are a number of avenues the film could have explored in order to give the film the scope it seems to be after. For example, Vance has a brother who's introduced at the beginning of the film and who presumably hangs around the entire time, but is never given any kind of character development. You'd think he'd have something to say about who inherits the estate, but nothing ever comes of it.

Despite feeling a bit rushed, The Furies is quite the odd little gem, unsurprisingly brought to DVD by the good folks at Criterion. Barbara Stanwyck is fantastic as Vance, a character that allows her to bring her impressive range as an actress to bear. Ruthless and ambitious, she's nonetheless vulnerable and sympathetic when necessary and generally an all around badass by the standards of a woman in a film made in 1950 and set in 1872. This is somewhat disappointingly undercut by her relationship with Wendell Corey's character, who's chauvinism struck me as a bit much, even given the era. Corey himself is also a bit bland, not quite possessing the charm of Gable or Grant, who could slap a woman around all day and still manage to be pretty damn likable.

Also excellent is Walter Huston as T.C., a hilariously self-possessed man's man who prints money with his own face on it and begins circulating it into the local economy in order to escape his crippling debts. The relationship between Vance and T.C. is, despite seeming vaguely incestual at times, is uniquely entertaining, as they scheme against each other while still maintaining a genuinely respectful and affable rapport.

As I said, the film doesn't really qualify as a Western, despite a fairly large shoot-out toward the end of the second act, but I probably enjoyed it more than Appoloosa, which was a bit of a mixed bag.

Well. It's good to be back. I think I'm just going to blame my month-long lapse on the weather. It's been depressing. I'm feeling good about this though. Thanks for sticking around.

UP NEXT: I'm going to a double feature at the Film Forum tomorrow night. They're winding down a Fritz Lang in Hollywood run and I'll be seeing You Only Live Once with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney and You & Me with George Raft and Sylvia Sydney again. Good thing she's adorable. Also, as part of my Oscar catch-up, I've got Winter's Bone and The Kids Are Alright from Netflix. Exciting times.