→ December 2, 2011
→ By

Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tense story of a woman who, after fleeing a cult-like commune, shows increasing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder as she attempts to reestablish her normal life and a relationship with her selfish sister and difficult brother-in-law. Based on the true story of a friend of writer/director Sean Durkin, the film is driven by two very strong performances and the use of both silence and background noise to allow the audience to feel the tension grow with the main character’s own mental troubles.

The film begins when Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley) flees the commune where she has lived for two years and calls her sister to ask for help; the call is awkward and Martha nearly gives up, showing how far she had fallen into the clutches of the commune’s charismatic, depraved leader Patrick (John Hawkes). From there, we see parallel narratives, one tracking Martha’s first few days of freedom with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law ted (Hugh Dancy) who want to help her as long as it’s no real inconvenience to them, the other following her two years in the cult from her first day to the incident that triggered her decision to escape. Both narratives follow similar curves with an initial ascent followed by a long, gradual decline, a dichotomy where each storyline intensifies the other.

The commune’s true nature only becomes apparent through gradual glimpses through Martha’s memory – and it’s possible that Martha isn’t a reliable narrator, given what happens to her in the other narrative – that reveal the commune to us more or less as it was revealed to her. She’s taken in as a bit of a lost soul, charmed by Patrick, eventually drugged and raped by him (which is explained to her as a “special” event that begins the “cleansing”) as part of her initiation. Patrick exercises control over the commune’s members through very subtle psychological manipulation, although that turns darker as the story develops. Martha – whom Patrick has rechristened “Marcy May,” as he renames all of the members – drifts into the lifestyle of the commune, never questioning any of its practices because she’s pleased, or at least satisfied, to have something resembling a family.

That need for family is explained in part by Martha’s time with her sister and brother-in-law, both flawed themselves and particularly ill-equipped to deal with a woman who has just fled a cult but claims she simply left a boyfriend. Her problems in this timeline start out as mere distance, moodiness, and ignorance of some social customs, but degenerate into delusions and paranoia, and Lucy and Ted show very little compassion or even the ability to generate it – we go through more than 80% of the movie before Lucy finally confronts Martha directly with the question of what happened to her during her two years out of contact. Their parents gone, Lucy is Martha’s only family, but there’s little warmth between them and more obligation than outright love, which stands in the way of Martha’s recovery almost as much as her own unwillingness to discuss what happened does.

Olsen is superb in the film, her first screen role, particularly in the second half of the film when she’s required to show a broader range of emotions; in the first half, she’s emotionally vacant in both narratives, but gets to stretch out into two different faces of the same character as the narrative unfolds. But Hawkes dominates his half of the story by almost trying not to dominate it: There’s no showiness, no bravura, just small gestures, eye contact, a faint change in the tone of his voice to convey the power he has over his charges. Olsen’s growing fear is the primary driver of the tension in the commune storyline, but Hawkes’ magnetism manages to elevate it even when all we have is the threat of his entrance. He’s a monster despite never acting like one; she’s the victim but never acts victim-like, only showing it through a slow crescendo of confusion and fear.

Both leads will at least be in the running for Best Actor/Actress nominations, although those categories are incredibly competitive, and if nothing else I think Martha Marcy May Marlene – the reason for the fourth name is too good to spoil – will end up with a Best Original Screenplay nod. If you can find it and like a tense, psychological drama with the tension of a British thriller, it’s well worth seeing.

I’d like to discuss the meaning of the end of the film, but for those of you who haven’t seen it, you may want to skip ahead. This paragraph has no value other than providing a warning and a buffer.

–

And this is another buffer, in case you didn’t listen the first time. Spoilers ahead.

There are three ways to interpret the end of the film, two literal, one other metaphorical. Perhaps the man is from the cult and has come to capture, harm, or kill Martha, which is certainly what she’s fearing. Perhaps the man’s appearance is just a coincidence; he could even be a random stalker, but not from the cult. But I favor a third interpretation – that the man’s status is irrelevant; the point of the scene is that Martha isn’t free of the effects of her two years in the cult, and might never be free. She will assume any incident like this is about the cult, or she’ll even experience more delusions like the two she had at the house and will see someone from the cult where there’s no one. The idea that her ordeal isn’t over is paramount, which is why it’s unnecessary to show the viewer the outcome of the incident in the street.

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→ November 30, 2011
→ By

Beginners.

Mike Mills’ 2011 film Beginners takes an event from his own life and turns it into the central plot point in a romantic drama about love, death, and depression. But it’s a much better and sweeter movie than that makes it sound.

As the film opens, we see the 38-year-old Oliver cleaning out a house, going through mementos and old papers, after which he explains (as narrator) that his father, Hal, has just died of cancer, four years after his mother died, which led Hal to reveal that he was gay and to embark on almost a second adolescence, finding new friends, a new love, and a happiness he’d never had during his four decades of marriage. That story, shown in retrospect, is cut in between shots of emotionally-stunted Oliver struggling to forge a new, and for him unusually happy, relationship with, Anna, a beautiful French actress who stumbles improbably into his life but is far from emotionally perfect herself. Oliver’s inability to be happy in love is only partially explained by what we learn about his family, but it’s too facile to say that he learns how to overcome that by watching his father – he learns how to start overcoming it, and to Mills’ credit, the film doesn’t make anything too easy on him or on us.

Nearly all of the dialogue – I’d be hard-pressed to call it action – in Beginners comes from the three central characters, with a few added lines from Hal’s younger boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic) and from the dog Arthur (via subtitles, if you were confused). Christopher Plummer is earning some justified Oscar buzz for his performance as the moribund Hal, whose mood is anything but as he finds himself liberated after 40-plus closeted years in an unfulfilled marriage that was, for him, more of a business arrangement; while I’d love to see him win Best Supporting Actor for sentimental reasons, it may also be that he wins for sentimental reasons, as he turns 82 in two weeks and has received just one nomination, in 2009 for The Last Station. It could be the Academy’s last chance to so honor Captain Von Trapp in a sort of lifetime achievement award.

But Plummer is truly the supporting actor to the two leads, Ewan Macgregor as Oliver and Mélanie Laurent as Anna, whose relationship we watch in tiny movements from inception to breakup (if you can call it that) to resolution, a path that seems painfully real in how precise some of those movements are. They meet at a costume party – one of those costume parties you only see on TV or in films, because all of the costumes are impeccable – where Anna has laryngitis and communicates via a tiny notepad, which still makes her louder than the grieving Oliver, just two months past the death of his father. From there, the film jumps around in time between their romance, often sweet but tinged with melancholy reflected in dim apartments and fall weather, and Hal’s last few years of personal freedom, exploring (his word) another side of himself while Oliver attempts to hold together a foundational element of his past. Discovering that his parents’ marriage was a sham – to him, fully, but to his father, only partly so – only cements his belief that relationships won’t work out, so why give them a chance to do so when you know you’ll fail?

We also see scenes from Hal’s marriage to Oliver’s mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller) in flashbacks in which Hal never appears: It’s always Oliver and his mother, and it becomes clear that while Hal viewed their marriage as an arrangement, she didn’t, and her growing alienation from her husband only compounded whatever issues she brought into the marriage in the first place. (This receives some explanation toward the end of the film, a mild spoiler I won’t reveal.) Witnessing his own parents’ loveless marriage, understanding that it was loveless with no understanding of why, warps Oliver’s own view of love and plants the seeds of an inability to build a lasting relationships that, with Anna, is exacerbated by his suffocating grief.

Laurent, meanwhile, could say virtually nothing and steal scenes just by virtue of being adorable, but Anna is battling a depression of her own, living an itinerant and ultimately lonesome lifestyle that may also reflect a reaction to a broken relationship between her still-living parents. It’s a hard trick to look sad without becoming pathetic when an actress and her character are both cute; while it took some time for Laurent to make Anna’s underlying sadness come through (the film is, after all, more focused on Oliver’s grief), the script turns enough to allow Laurent to stretch out beyond the façade of Anna’s playfulness. Her reunion with Oliver at the film’s end would have felt forced if he was the only one struggling emotionally, one of several small twists in the film that made it more effective and less sentimental than a standard girl-fixes-guy romantic drama.

Mills’ script succeeds when it’s subtle but veers off course when he veers outside the relationships at the film’s core. The conversations between Oliver and Anna are soft, short, understated – sometimes too much so, as in the breakup conversation that neither my wife nor I fully understood – contributing to a tentative feeling that conveys Oliver’s own uncertainty at entering a relationship that might not fail (and perhaps Anna’s uncertainty over the same). What I could have done without was Oliver’s inexplicable job – he’s some sort of artist or sketcher who ignores a rock band client’s request for an album cover, instead producing a series of badly-drawn sketches about the history of sadness that is far more about him (and emphasizing just how sad he is) than about the client, whose needs we never actually hear about anyway. Mills wants us to know just how Sad everyone is, but the dialogue and the tiny interactions between Oliver and Anna already provide that, leaving his sketches (e.g., “First couple too in love to be sad”) feeling extraneous. It was a heavy-handed flourish in a film that didn’t need it; Beginners wins you over with the delicate scenes between Oliver and Anna the contrast with the unfettered last few years for Hal.

* I don’t understand how this moved ended up with a rating of “R.” There’s no violence at all, and very little foul language. There’s no on-screen sex or even nudity – just a few shots of Melanie Laurent’s bare back, and if that merits an “R” rating, I must be one of the New Libertines or something. It seems to me that the ratings board members must have been watching the movie and saying, “Wow, what a nice film, we should make it PG or PG-13 since it’s so inoffe…oh my God there are two men kissing! Rate it R! RATE! IT! R!”

* Ewan Macgregor was just as charming as a shy phone-company tech in Little Voice, a 1998 vehicle for singer Jane Horrocks, who plays a painfully shy woman with a hidden talent for impersonating great singers. (Those of you with young daughters know her as the voice of Fairy Mary in the Tinker Bell movies. Yes, you do, stop lying.) Horrocks owns the movie when she sings, but it’s a virtuoso performance from Michael Caine, who won a Golden Globe for the film, as the unscrupulous talent agent who sees one last chance to make a killing.

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→ November 28, 2011
→ By

The Fighter.

I finally got around to watching The Fighter (on sale for $9.49 through that link) on Friday night – an odd experience seeing Amy Adams as a New England townie a few hours after I saw her in The Muppets – which makes it the ninth and final 2010 Best Picture nominee for me to watch. (I’m not watching 127 Hours, because I can’t stand James Franco, and that movie is basically him.) A few of you loved it, and a few of you said it was a decent movie with great performances; I’d put myself squarely in the latter camp.

Based very loosely on the story of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a boxer from Lowell who made a somewhat improbable comeback in his 30s after a hiatus from the sport, becoming the WBU light welterweight champion, at which point the film ends. (I know zilch about boxing, as you probably guessed.) Ward’s brother and part-time trainer, Dick Eklund (Christian Bale), was also a professional boxer whose career ended due to cocaine addiction and ended up in jail for armed robbery. The film melodramatizes their relationship, moving around several events in the timeline to heighten the tension, while also folding in their crazy mother, played by Melissa Leo, and Ward’s girlfriend Charlene (Adams), who provides him with some stability and common sense. In an inspired move by the directors, Ward’s other trainer, Mickey O’Keefe, is played by … Mickey O’Keefe himself, well enough that it never occurred to me that he wasn’t a professional actor.

The film itself is a tight but rather generic underdog sports film, where Ward gets beaten down in the ring and out of it, quitting boxing and eventually having his hand broken in a fight with police where he’s defending his idiot brother (which I don’t think ever actually happened). With Dick in jail, Micky throws off the deadweight of him and his mother, rededicates himself to training, and ends up winning several fights, one of which comes after some advice from a still-imprisoned Dick. The curve of the narrative is so smooth that I felt like I was being played.

But the performances are really out of sight. Bale and Leo won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Actress; Bale’s was a pretty easy call, but I thought Leo largely won because of her accent and look, with Adams delivering an equally strong but more nuanced performance. There’s a great scene where she and Micky are about to have a little afternoon delight – with a shot of her in black lingerie that is absolutely there because, hey, Amy Adams in black lingerie sounds great – that culminates with Adams beating the crap out of one of Micky’s twenty-nine sisters on the porch of the house where she lives; Charlene is tough, independent (which grates on Micky’s family), but guarded, and doesn’t have the same over-the-top I’m-so-wicked-local veneer as Leo’s portrayal of Alice as a scheming, white-trashy woman who sees Micky as a paycheck and Dick as a misunderstood kid, not as an addict, thief, and anchor on his brother. Wahlberg plays the title role but is so understated next to the manic Bale that he’s overshadowed, but a similarly ebullient character would have made the film unwatchable (never mind whether it would have been realistic).

Again, I don’t follow boxing or even remotely like the sport, but one thing I noticed was that the boxing scenes looked somewhat realistic – the punches looked like they were landing, as opposed to the standard “wow, he really made contact with that pocket of air” technique. I’m sure some of the boxing scenes were glamorized, and real fans of the sweet science could probably pick them apart (please do – I’m curious), but at least the makers of the film made an effort to make the fight scenes watchable to the non-fan.

And, because everyone loves a ranking, here are the Best Picture nominees from 2011, in one non-critic’s opinion, with links to my reviews of seven of them.

1. Winter’s Bone
2. The King’s Speech
3. The Social Network
4. Toy Story 3
5. True Grit
6. Inception
7. The Fighter
8. Black Swan
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. Sorry, I’m just not watching it.

Of course, those aren’t the best films of 2010, but it seemed like a good enough place to start. I have heard raves about Animal Kingdom, so that’s in the queue.

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→ November 26, 2011
→ By

The Muppets.

When I originally heard that Jason Segel was writing a script for a brand-new Muppet movie that would attempt to reboot the franchise, I was excited, and nervous. It’s been almost 20 years since the last decent Muppet film (The Muppet Christmas Carol, among our favorite holiday movies), and after a long hiatus since the last one, it was going to take a big hit to overcome any skepticism after the mediocre Muppets from Space and the disastrous Muppet Treasure Island to revive the brand. Segel’s endeavor could easily have been the death of the Muppets, too. I’m beyond thrilled to report that it’s a rebirth instead, and one of the most enjoyable nostalgia projects I could imagine.

Segel has created a two-layered script that accomplishes the most important thing in any Muppet film: He has them put on a show, which, naturally, is needed in the story to save the theater from destruction at the hands of evil oil baron Tex Richman (played by Chris Cooper, clearly having the time of his life). The basic story has Segel’s character, Gary, and his little brother, Walter (who is a Muppet, but no one seems to realize this, which is a great conceit that just sits in the background like an inside joke), headed to Los Angeles with Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), where they go to tour the Muppet Studios only to learn of Richman’s evil plot. They track down Kermit the Frog, living in semi-retirement in the home that he should have shared with Miss Piggy, and persuade him to put the gang back together for “one more show.” And Walter, who has never been able to fit in as the lone felt creature in a town full of actual humans, lives the ultimate fan’s fantasy, working alongside his idols and finding, for the first time in his life, a community where he really fits in.

The macro story here, and the real theme of the The Muppets, is that there are, and have always been, millions of Muppet fans out there just waiting … and waiting … for someone (one of us, as it turned out) to bring them back into the spotlight in a movie that cuts right to the heart of what we love about the characters individually and as an ensemble. Segel is such a fan that he inserts himself and his fuzzy alter-ego brother into the movie, only to wisely work Gary and Mary back out of the story in the second half of the film so that the Muppets can take over. And take over they do, with Walter on board, and a great turn by Jack Black playing the, um, reluctant guest host of the show-within-the-film. Amy Adams also deserves mention for an incredibly game performance that includes a very silly dance number in the middle of a diner and a slew of wide-eyed, deadpan lines that kept emphasizing how very absurd all of this is. Having seen her in The Fighter a few hours later, I feel like she’s the Nicole Kidman of this generation of actresses, up for absolutely anything and able to nail whatever role she’s given; let’s hope she doesn’t botox herself into zombiedom in her 40s like Kidman has.

That’s not to say the celebrity cameos, such a critical element in the best Muppet movies, are absent – they’re there, and many of them make an impact in just a few seconds of screen time. Neil Patrick Harris has one line and it’s one of the funniest jokes in the film. Mickey Rooney’s cameo is a funny nod to past cameos. Jim Parsons’ cameo would be ruined if I tried to explain it, but he’s nails. I kept waiting for someone to point at Rashida Jones with both hands and say, “Ann Perkins,” and she was one of the best at interacting with the Muppets, grabbing Kermit by the lapels and shaking him like half the guest stars on the original The Muppet Show used to do. Dave Grohl hams it up as “Animool,” maybe his best performance since the “Big Me” video. And Zach Galfinakis has to be a lock to appear as Hobo Joe in every Muppet movie going forward.

Segel also shows off his knowledge of the characters with some Muppet cameos as well. The Beautiful Day Monster is taking pledge calls in the balcony, and Wayne and Wanda appear for a moment when the lights come back on after Chris Cooper briefly cuts the power to the theater. The Newsman (one of the few voices that didn’t work for me) appears briefly in the balcony as well. Marvin Suggs and the Muppaphone appear in the “Life’s a Happy Song” reprise. Behemoth is in Jack Black’s dressing room – and how did he not eat anything? – with a few other monsters I couldn’t name. If Segel had a checklist of Muppets to include, he couldn’t have been more complete.

The music, which really set the two good Muppet movies (the original and the Christmas Carol) apart, is outstanding here, making Bret McKenzie the somewhat unlikely heir to the legacy of Paul Williams, who wrote most of the music in those two earlier flicks. “Life’s a Happy Song” is the breakout hit, stuck in my head for the rest of the day (which is fine by me) and so good they included it twice, while “Man or Muppet” inserts some much-needed humor at a point where the film threatened to get all serious-like on us. But the gem on the soundtrack was actually written by a songwriting team largely responsible for writing bubblegum pop songs for Disney artists: “Pictures In My Head” has Kermit walking down the hall in his House of Usher, looking at old photographs of his castmates and wondering “Would anyone watch or even care, or did something break we can’t repair?” It’s the first of a surprising number of highly emotional moments in the film.

One of those other emotional moments comes when Segel, constantly paying homage to history, has Kermit and Miss Piggy perform a duet of “Rainbow Connection,” which is a high point of the film but had particular resonance for me. In 1994, PBS aired an episode of “Great Performances” on the life of Jim Henson; when they reach the end of his life in the documentary, the producers used “Rainbow Connection,” apparently at Jerry Juhl’s suggestion, to close the discussion of Henson’s life and death and lead into the closing credits. I’ve only seen the show once, when it first aired, but that song, already a favorite of mine, has always brought me back to that point in the documentary, where the full impact of our loss seems to hit all at once. (If whoever holds the copyright on that show has any sense of marketing, they’ll put it out on DVD now while the Muppets are hot again.)

If you don’t love these characters already, however, the film is going to feel a little thin. The story is good by Muppet movie standards, but the contortions required to get the Muppets back together and on the stage don’t leave much time for plot. The film is actually not that funny – it’s sweet, sentimental, almost romantic, but has only a handful of real laugh-out-loud moments, more from the humans than the Muppets. (I’m pleased to report that the much-maligned “fart shoes” joke turned out to be funnier, and more clever, than the trailer indicated.) Chris Cooper rapping is something I never need to see again – and really, can we just put a moratorium on older white male actors rapping badly in film and on TV? It’s not funny now, because it was never funny. I mentioned the Newsman’s voice being off, and Fozzie Bear’s voice was only intermittently right, like two people were behind it, or like the one person behind it couldn’t hold the right pitch and kept slipping out of character, although the vast majority of Muppet voices were more than good enough. I could also pick nits at the absence of a ballroom scene or Veterinarian’s Hospital, but now I’m just being (in my wife’s words) a “Muppet sap.”

I was a little surprised that they tweaked some of the Muppet characters’ personalities, although that may just emphasize just how much I have invested in the characters at this point. Kermit remains the flawed hero, frequently frustrated but less stalwart than in the past, and I missed his old habit of freaking out and flailing his flippers all over the place. (They had a chance, too, in the kidnapping discussion.) Gonzo seemed a little less, well, gonzo, and I don’t remember any lines from his pal Rizzo. Even Miss Piggy seemed a little older and wiser, with just one real “Hiiiii-YAH” in the film, although she made it count. But again, if you lack history with them, you’re not even noticing this stuff, let alone nitpicking like I am. You’ll find it a sweet film with fun music, corny humor, and very high production values compared to any previous Muppet film, but you won’t get all choked up when Kermit walks out of the theater doors for what might be the last time.

If you do love the characters, and I assume by this point you know where I stand on that subject, you couldn’t ask for a better film than this. It’s a tribute, a love letter, a nostalgia trip, a shot in the arm, and probably the impetus for a slew of sequels – and perhaps a revival of the TV show? Please? – written and performed by people who feel the same way we do. But the highest praise I can offer is that after we walked out of the theater, my five-year-old daughter, who knows the characters but obviously doesn’t have the same history with them, said to us, “I want to buy that movie.” I’m hoping her generation takes to these characters the way mine did.

Oh, and next spring, when I need to go see high school players scattered across the country, I am absolutely going to travel by map.

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→ November 3, 2011
→ By

Sugar.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up, and I chatted about that and other stuff today as well.

—

I’d had Sugar – the 2008 baseball movie, as there are a few films by that tile – saved up on the DVR for months before finally getting around to watching it last night, since I was distracted by The Wire when I had some free time to sit and watch a show. Sugar might be the best pure baseball movie I’ve seen, except that at heart it’s not really a baseball movie, but a movie about being the ultimate fish out of water, and how baseball exploits one of its most dedicated underclasses.

Miguel “Sugar” Santos is a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic with arm strength but no real second pitch who signed at some point with the Kansas City Knights before the movie began for just $15,000. Early in the film, an American scout for the Knights visits the team’s academy in Boca Chica and teaches Sugar how to through a spike or knuckle curve, which becomes a separator for him and earns him an invite to spring training and eventually a spot in the rotation of the Bridgetown (Iowa) Swing, KC’s low-A affiliate. Once there, however, things don’t go as smoothly as Sugar and his family had hoped, either on the field, where a minor injury throws off his entire season, or off of it, where he’s isolated by age, culture, and language.

The film’s pacing was a real strength – there’s no racing through the early stages to rush to get Sugar to the U.S., so viewers unfamiliar with the feeder system in the Dominican Republic see something of where these players come from and how tough the odds are against them even getting to the U.S. This isn’t exploitation along the lines of slave labor or sweat shops, but these players often sign for very little money at 16 because their other economic opportunities are limited or nonexistent. Sugar doesn’t focus too much on the baseball season because the team’s performance is secondary to the story of the players; even when we see game action, it’s backdrop.

(The cinematography during those game sequences was really uneven; close-up shots of players throwing the ball around the infield were jerky and hard to watch, but the shots of Sugar pitching were perfect, right down to the change in angles from showing his face to showing the pitch reach the batter.)

Sugar himself is the only fully-developed character, but unlike many single-character movies, the various side characters who play significant roles still manage to contribute to the story without letting their one-dimensionality get in the movie’s way. Sugar stays with the Higgins family, an older couple on a farm a good distance from Bridgetown, providing the ultimate culture shock for Sugar, establishing just how out of water he is in Iowa and how much he’s hindered by language even in the most basic aspects of life, and adding a few moments of humor (the wife telling him to put “sopa” in the washing machine rather than “jabon”). And when things start to fall apart for Sugar, it’s to the Higgins that he turns, because his family has become so wrapped up in his potential for a lucrative baseball career that they are no longer there to support him. We never learn much about the Higgins’, but we shouldn’t – they fulfilled a critical role without unnecessary tangents.

The actor who plays Sugar, Algenis Perez Soto, wasn’t a professional actor but was seen playing baseball by the directors after their casting call didn’t turn up the ideal candidate. (Or so the story goes.) That use of non-professionals reminded me of City of God, a Brazilian film that also used local kids from the dangerous barrio of that name in Rio de Janeiro in what remains one of the best movies I’ve seen. In both movies, which couldn’t be more different in tone or subject matter, there’s a lack of polish to the central characters that makes them look and sound more real.

I mentioned on Twitter that there were minor inaccuracies, but I was happy to forgive them because they were there in service of a stronger plot and consistent pacing. For a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic to pick up a spike curveball one fall/winter, then earn an invite to spring training, and then be assigned to a full-season club as a starter is not impossible, but it’s extremely unlikely – and the type of pitcher who’d travel that path wouldn’t find himself in the position Sugar was in later in the film. And that spike curveball is a problem – Sugar is seen throwing it for strikes once he gets the hang of it, but it’s probably the hardest pitch to command, and very few big leaguers throw it; it’s more common for player development folks to convert pitchers from the spike to a traditional curveball or to a slider because the spike is so often in the dirt. I also found it odd that the Stanford alum was so slow to pick up on Sugar’s lack of English skills, but then again, he was also a really nice guy when we know all Stanford alumni are insufferable.

But the filmmakers here seemed to be in command of the points where they bent reality. Moving Sugar along so quickly is necessary; the alternatives are a much longer film or inserting a “six months later…” gap. The spike curveball isn’t the ideal pitch for that situation, but it has a benefit – the grip used to throw one is so unusual relative to those on other pitches that it would be evident to non-baseball fans that this was a new pitch for Sugar. Even when the waitress in the famous “fren toas” scene read a little false to me when she asked Sugar how he wanted his eggs, but that slight off-note came back around thirty seconds later when she brought the food to the table in one of the best scenes in the film.

It would be impossible to avoid comparing Sugar to that baseball movie that came out earlier this fall, which I didn’t like as a movie or as a baseball movie. Sugar has moments of sentiment, but there’s no manipulation of the audience to create them. The main character’s struggles, even though they will be foreign to most U.S. viewers, resonated far more strongly with me because they get at fundamental human needs – the need to belong, to fit in, to succeed, to live up to others’ expectations. And while Sugar doesn’t have a villain on the order of the fictionalized Grady Fuson, it should open some eyes to how much the current system exploits young Latin American players, particularly Dominican players, and discards them if they’re no longer useful to their parent clubs. Some major league teams are better at assimilating Latin American players – particularly in terms of teaching them English – but some are worse, and I know of none that help players once they’re released. (And don’t get me started on our nation’s immigration policies.) The directors made these issues evident to viewers without letting them interfere with the story. This film is about Sugar Santos and his own personal development because of baseball, for better and later for worse, and it deserves a much, much wider audience than it has received to date.

(I might have been kidding about the Stanford stuff, though.)

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→ October 3, 2011
→ By

Jane Eyre (2011 film).

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is #38 on my ranking of the 100 greatest novels I’ve read, a spot that balances the highly improbable plot against the brilliance of its blend of a gothic horror story, a traditional romance (complete with brooding hero), and a portrayal of a smart, independent female heroine. It is so beloved across the English-speaking world that it has received at least eleven adaptations for the big and small screens, including this spring’s version starring Mia Wasikowska as Jane, combining her brilliant performance with a script that’s faithful to the book’s dialogue and characters but upends its narrative structure to negative effect.

If you haven’t read the novel, you should, but here’s a quick summary. Jane Eyre is orphaned and raised by her cruel aunt, shipped off to a strict Christian boarding school, and eventually hired as governess to another orphaned child, Adele, whose guardian, Edward Rochester (played by Michael Fassbender, whom you might recognize from the bar scene in Inglourious Basterds), is that dark, brooding hero. She and Rochester develop a slow-burning romance even as he hides a terrible secret that will prevent them from marrying – and when that secret is revealed, Jane flees in the middle of the night, eventually finding shelter with a rural missionary, St. John, and his two sisters*. St. John (Jamie Bell, better known as the original Billy Elliott) intends to leave for missionary work in India and proposes that Jane become his wife and join him in his work … but, of course, Jane is not finished with Rochester, regardless of her desire to forget him and their tragedy.

*In the book, it’s revealed that St. John and Jane are, quite improbably, cousins. The film dispenses with this, a reasonable choice even though it makes one of Jane’s eventual decisions seem more generous as a result.

Moira Buffini’s script is incredibly faithful to Brontë’s original words, if not the structure as a whole. Many memorable phrases from the book are preserved here either wholly intact or with minor changes in word order or tense, including its best line, Jane’s question to Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Waskikowska plays Jane as close to her literary counterpart as I could imagine, while Fassbender and Bell both shift their characters one half-step towards the audience – Rochester still broods, but never seethes, while St. John, so austere in the book, shows Jane a quiet affection that one might at a glance mistake for love until Jane calls him out on it. Brontë’s novel gives so much more depth to Jane than to either male character that infusing both with more humanity is actually a welcome interpolation, within the boundaries set by the author but in a way that makes the emotions in the film seem more much real.

Buffini decided, however, that using Brontë’s words she would alter the sequence in which we see the major events: The film begins with Jane’s flight from Thornfield, and has her reliving her story in her mind as St. John and his sisters attempt to restore her to health. The decision to use the hackneyed flashback narrative technique detracted greatly from the film, both up front – where, if you didn’t know the plot, you could easily get lost – and at the end, where the tension of that part of the book is dissipated. In the novel, that last section derives all of its drama and narrative greed from the reader’s desire to see how on earth Jane could be reunited with Rochester after fleeing from Thornfield, disavowing her past, and taking up a quiet life as a village schoolteacher to lower-class girls. Her dull life adds nothing to the tension of the book’s core romance, put asunder by Rochester’s deceit with no apparent way to repair the rift, so it is merely the passage of time, of page after page without progress, that provides any incentive at all to plow through descriptions of her life with St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) and his sisters. But by shifting half of the time spent on this section of the story to the beginning, and just generally cutting down on the screen time committed to it, there’s virtually no tension left – a viewer unfamiliar with the story would have no idea how close Jane comes to committing to go to India, and the reason for her refusal to marry St. John without love appears to be solely that she still loves Rochester, not that she’s an independent woman who is unwilling to sacrifice her principles for social expediency. Minimizing the portions of the book that focus on Jane’s youth and her time with St. John is an understandable move to fit the novel into two hours, but losing the gravity of the decision she makes with regard to the latter is a major blow.

I’m no Oscar prognosticator, but I would throw out there a guess that Wasikowska might earn a Best Actress nomination for her role here, while the film itself should grab a passel of nominations for costumes, lighting, and scenery. There was a very clear determination to make the film look as authentic as possible, including the use of natural light – meaning candlelight or fireplaces for nighttime scenes, enhancing the gothic feel of the film – at all times. It had to make the production more difficult, but the reward for that effort is evidence throughout the movie.

Jane Eyre also saw a longer adaptation in 2006 starring English stage and TV actress Ruth Wilson as Jane and Toby Stephens (son of Dame Maggie Smith) as Rochester. This four-hour miniseries ran on PBS here as the two-part finale of Masterpiece Theatre (now simply known as Masterpiece), hewing much more closely to the book’s plot structure while altering more of its dialogue and even playing a little loose with Jane’s character, modernizing her in a way that seemed out of place in a work set in the 1840s. Despite that, it is beautifully rendered and the script gives a much fuller treatment to the development of Jane’s relationship with Rochester that simply isn’t possibly in the 120 minutes of the 2011 version.

Also, if you’ve read Jane Eyre or seen any of the film adaptations, you must read Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, a hilarious satirical romp that involves a literary detective who has a special relationship of her own with Rochester and is on the case when a madman makes sure Jane doesn’t wake up in the middle of that one fateful night.

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→ September 29, 2011
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The Kids Are All Right.

The more I think about The Kids Are All Right (currently $6.59 on amazon), a 2010 comedy nominated for Best Picture with every other movie made in Hollywood last year, the more frustrating I find it. It is extremely well-acted, with as many as five strong performances depending on your standards for younger actors, and deliberately uncomfortable almost from the first line of dialogue. Its exploration of the nature of complex long-term relationships by using one we might (wrongly) consider “unusual” and making it look as usual as it should be is insightful and unflinching. And then the whole thing falls flat in the final ten minutes, as if the writers just ran out of steam – or were encouraged to deliver a more traditional ending.

Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) Allgood are a married lesbian couple who have raised two children, 18-year-old Joni and 15-year-old (I think) Laser, each borne by a different mother but from sperm from the same anonymous donor. Laser pushes Joni to call the sperm bank and request to contact the donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a modern-hippie restaurateur who becomes involved in the kids’ lives, much to the chagrin of Nic. Jules, meanwhile, is trying to get a landscape design business for which she seems fairly unqualified off the ground, and agrees to take on Paul as her first client, only to – mild spoiler here – end up sleeping with him. (The scene where they first have sex includes a hilarious nod to the scene in Boogie Nights where Moore’s character first sees Dirk Diggler’s jiggler.) The consequences of that act, while fairly predictable, aren’t fully played out at the end of the film, particularly not for Paul, whose storyline was cut off without a fraction of resolution, a shame for a character that was both central and well-developed, flawed yet sympathetic, often the lens through which we see the Allgoods more clearly.

At first blush, I took the film to be a meditation on the nature of families and how delicate the balance can be even in what otherwise appears to be an emotionally strong family; the fact that the parents are gay is only relevant in that it allows for the sperm-donor plot line, as otherwise the Allgoods are a standard nuclear family. But now I’m wondering if the film is really about Nic, and how destructive her own controlling personality is on her family, especially on Jules and Laser. She crosses the line into overinvolvement in some of her interrogations of her kids (and the third degree she later gives Paul). She uses Jules’ and Paul’s affair as a weapon to drive wedges between Jules and the kids as well as between Paul and the kids, and to reestablish her dominance in her relationship with Jules. In the dinner scene at Paul’s house, she brings the entire conversation to a halt with a seemingly innocent move that is designed to get all eyes on her. Even before the final blowout with Jules, their arguments revolve around her dissatisfaction – and if Jules tries to get a word in about her own complaints, Nic manages to refocus the argument about herself. She might be a narcissist, but even if not she clearly has a driving need to control everything she can in her life, even if that means detracting from the lives of those closest to her.

Bening is off the charts in her performance as Nic – what a year for actresses in starring roles – infusing nearly every scene, even light ones, with the tension that defines her tightly-wound character. Moore was also excellent in her typical up-for-anything role, but I thought Bening’s task was tougher, as Nic is written with strong masculine and feminine sides; she’s the head of household, breadwinner, decision-maker, with boyishly short hair, yet wears makeup (Jules doesn’t), shows more outward emotion, takes more care of her overall appearance … perhaps the character is just overwhelmed by the extent of the role she expects or is expected to fill, and just when she has the balance right, in comes Paul to upset everything. This conflict makes it all the more unsatisfying when the storyline ends so abruptly. A clean, complete resolution would be unrealistic, but there’s an “everything’s going to be fine” vibe to the closing scenes that I didn’t think was set up by anything that came before it.

Ruffalo was affecting in an understated role as the soft-spoken, warm-hearted Paul, living a twenty-year-old’s dream life only to realize through his discovery of an instant family that he doesn’t have the life he really wants. The script easily could have left him as simply a vehicle to expose the fragile structure holding the Allgood family together, but instead he was a fully-formed character who establishes different relationships with each of the four family members. Laser ended up with the least development – although he has one of the better lines when his mothers catch him and a friend watching an adult DVD, a scene that is about as awkward (in a good way) as any realistic movie can get – and his relationship with Paul is also underexplored, especially since he was the one who originally pushed his sister to call the sperm bank.

I can watch and appreciate a tough, complex, uncomfortable movie if there’s a decent payoff at the end – again, not necessarily a clear dénouement wrapped up in a bow, but one where the protagonists are, if not better off, at least materially changed because of the conclusion of the episode they’ve just experienced. The Kids Are All Right does so many things well, but the characters end their story under an illusion that nothing at all has changed. Maybe that’s the point, but for me, it took away from much of the reward of watching the first 90 minutes.

Apropos of nothing, the title of this film has put the Supergrass song “Alright” in my head for the last week.

Next up: The 2011 remake of Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska, who played Joni in this movie, as the title character.

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→ September 16, 2011
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Black Swan.

Black Swan is an extremely well-acted psychological thriller about a tightly-wound ballet dancer who may or may not be losing her mind as a result of the stress of her job (and, perhaps, malnutrition from her bulimia). It’s also thinly plotted and hard to watch because of (I assume deliberately) shaky cinematography and dim lighting.

A New York ballet company is putting on a production of Swan Lake just as its longtime star, now 35, is being forced out of her role due to age. Nina, a shy but very talented technical ballerina, wins the central part playing both the White and Black Swans in the show, but finds herself beset by doubts, hounded by impossible visions, and threatened by a new dancer just in from San Francisco who may or may not be trying to steal her role.

The movie rests heavily on the depth of its four main characters and the performances given by those actors. Natalie Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her central role as Nina, a fragile, childlike ballerina who is perfect for the White Swan role but is so obsessed with perfection that she can’t provide the passionate, reckless dancing required for a convincing seductress Black Swan. Portman, like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, has to be on pointe throughout the film to pull it off, as her character is in every scene and she must be credible as an adult whose emotional and physical growth has been stunted. I was put off by her wispy voicing of almost every line through the first hour and a half, although it did help cement her nervous, timid personality.

Mila Kunis probably earned more notoriety for her sex scene with Portman than she did for her work in the rest of the film, but whose work as a free-spirited, gregarious colleague who must create suspicion in the viewer’s mind about her ultimate motives was as essential to the film’s credibility as Portman’s work. Vincent Cassel, whom I’d only seen before in Eastern Promises, is outstanding as Thomas, the creepy-but-not-always-creepy director of the ballet company, a man who is probably abusing his position and yet gives no doubt that he is committed to coaxing a command performance from his star. Barbara Hershey, playing Nina’s mother, alternates between a vindictive Mommie Dearest and a loving if overprotective mother who is desperate to prevent ballet from ruining her daughter’s life while living vicariously through her daughter’s success.

But how much of what we see is real, and how much is filtered through the distorted lenses of Nina’s hallucinations? Much of what we see in the film is clearly faulty wiring in her head, including a scene where she peels a thick layer of skin off her finger, or another where her legs spontaneously break in absurd directions. But those obvious illusions could be tipping us off that much of what seems real isn’t, something backed up by frequent decisions to use a vantage point directly behind Nina’s head. Is her mother actually the witch we see in half of her scenes, or is that Nina’s perception of her? How much of Lily’s two-faced personality is, again, Nina’s jealousy manifesting itself in imagined or distorted conversations that are shown to us through her mind? I don’t think there’s a correct answer on this one, but after thinking about the movie for the last 36 hours, I’m inclined to believe that she is the film’s unreliable narrator, and virtually none of what we see before the final scene can be taken at face value.

The story itself contains enough small twists and turns to maintain a moderate level of tension, even though it should be clear from the start where we must finish, since Thomas explains the plot of Swan Lake and the script doesn’t hide the parallels between the film and the ballet within it. But the decision to shoot so many scenes from behind Portman on some kind of handheld camera made for very rough, shaky cinematography – again, possibly a conscious decision to reflect the turmoil inside of Nina’s head, but hell to watch at long stretches. That’s exacerbated by the fact that the lighting in just about every scene in the film is poor and everything is dank and gray, good for keeping the mood bleak but, again, tough to watch for a hundred minutes.

My wife danced for about seven years as a child at a local ballet school, so I defer to her on questions about the dancing in the film. Her gut impression was that we were seeing much more of Portman’s dancing double, Sarah Lane, than we were of Portman, saying the key was to watch the character’s feet – a non-professional dancer couldn’t point her toes or arch her foot half as well as someone who’s been dancing for a decade, because of muscle and bone development. She assumed that any time Nina’s feet were out of the shot or her face wasn’t visible – we had a lot of scenes where her face was blocked by another character or only visible in a blurry reflection in a mirror – that it was her double.

To answer two questions I’m anticipating from the regular readers among you:

* I’m torn on Best Actress between Portman and Lawrence. Both roles were difficult. Both women executed them about as well as I could expect. I think Lawrence’s was more difficult, but feel like I’m unqualified to make that judgment when it’s such a close call; it seems to me like playing a child who acts convincingly like an adult would be harder than playing an adult who acts convincingly like a child. I know Lawrence was more critical to Winter’s Bone than Portman was to Black Swan, but is that not analogous to judging an MVP candidate by the caliber of his teammates? I still lean Lawrence, but without confidence that she’s the right call over Portman.

* Best Picture: I’m through seven, and this would be at the bottom of the seven for me. Good movie, but not on par with the previous six I’ve seen. I think The Kids Are All Right is on its way to us from Netflix.

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→ September 14, 2011
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Moneyball.

Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.

The movie failed first and foremost for me as a movie, not just as a baseball movie. (I’ll get to the baseball parts later.) The general plot here is that the A’s lose their 2001 ALDS to the Yankees and are about to lose three major players to free agency, so Billy Beane goes hunting for a new way of doing business. He runs into a stats geek working in Cleveland’s front office named Peter Brand, hires him, and Brand brings the sabermetric philosophy that we now associate with the early 2000s Oakland teams. This causes friction with Oakland’s scouts, who are all idiots, and Art Howe, who was a stubborn idiot (this is the movie, not my opinion), and Billy might even lose his job until the A’s get hot and win 20 games in a row. Meanwhile, we are to believe that this is all so Billy can purge the personal demons created by the failure of his playing career.

Billy is the only fully realized character in the entire movie, and even at that his disparate pieces don’t tie all that well together. Peter Brand, a.k.a. Paul Antipodesta, is a mousy number cruncher who looks like the lay viewer would expect a stat geek to look – unathletic, dressed in dull collared shirts and ties, intimidated by the players, with no complexity to the character. Howe is nothing but a holier than thou obstacle for Beane whose entire motivation for his stubbornness is his desire for a contract extension – a hopelessly tired plot device that makes for a one-dimensional character. Even Casey, Billy’s daughter, who is shoehorned into this weird plot strand about him possibly losing his job, is nothing more than the plot strand requires her to be.

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

Pitt is very good with the stilted material he’s given and clearly made an effort to look and act the part, from his hair to his tone of voice to his facial expressions. He’s also frequently eating or drinking, which he seems to do in every movie in which he appears. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, is very good when he can use his character’s dry, monotonous delivery for comedic effect, drawing laughs from lines that aren’t inherently funny because his timing is so good. Chris Pratt has several funny moments as Scott Hatteberg, very recognizable if youve seen his work as Andy on Parks and Recreation, although he really only has two scenes of any significance in this movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was wasted as Howe, unfortunately, playing a one-note character who would like you to know he doesn’t care what you have to say about baseball. Robin Wright Penn is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

I could have tolerated a lot of flaws if Moneyball had just given me a good baseball movie, with some real tension to it, or perhaps a strong character study of Billy Beane. But the film provides neither, and I spent most of the movie wondering what was really on the line here. The A’s don’t win a playoff series in 2002, so the script can’t set that up as a goal or use the playoffs as a climax. Beane took a $39 million team to the playoffs the year before; he wasn’t going to be fired in May for taking a few risks that his owner more or less told him to take (and if he had been fired, he would have been hired by someone else in a heartbeat, despite the character’s later claim to the contrary). His daughter is worried about him because she doesn’t see the big picture, but neither she nor her father is in any real jeopardy at any point in the film. We’re not playing for anything here.

—

Then there’s the baseball stuff, which is not good. For starters, the lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted. Current Oakland scouting director Eric Kubota also gets murdered in a drive-by line that depicts him as a clueless intern given the head scouting role after Beane fires Grady Fuson in April after a clubhouse argument (that never really happened). I’ll confess to laughing at the scout referring to “this Bill James bullshit,” although the A’s bought into that bullshit years before the film claims they did – and, in fact, hired Paul Depodesta three years before the movie-A’s hired Brand. (In the film, Fuson refers to Brand as “Google boy,” a term applied to Depodesta by Luddite beat writers in LA three years later.)

The film also relies on some pretty gross misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the business. The idea of a GM getting on a plane and flying two thirds of the way across the country to meet another GM to discuss a trade for a left-handed reliever is so absurd that it should set off alarm bells in even the casual fan. Do you really think that GMs only talk trades in person? That they fly to meet each other for tete-a-tetes before consummating any deal? Similarly, teams don’t sign injured players to guaranteed contracts by flying out to their houses (on Christmas Eve, apparently) without having them go through physicals.

I wasn’t as concerned with the script having Beane trade Carlos Pena to Detroit for a reliever and some money (as opposed to the actual three-team, seven-player deal including Jeff Weaver and Jeremy Bonderman) as I was with seeing Pena, an intelligent, gregarious person, depicted as a sullen Latino player. I also find it hard to believe Beane would ever say he didn’t care about pitchers’ platoon splits. And the film’s emphasis on Beane not making it as a player seems to point to questions about his makeup, especially his confidence, which hardly ties into a film about how makeup is overrated.

If you do end up seeing the film, and I imagine most of you will, there is one scene towards the end that stood out for me as incredibly spot on, so much so that it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. Beane is sitting in what was then called the .406 club at Fenway Park with John Henry, who is about to offer him a record-breaking deal to become the Red Sox’ new GM. Henry expounds on how Beane’s method of doing things is going to sweep through the industry, and how critics within the game weren’t just trying to protect the game, but were expressing their own fears about their livelihoods. That speech applies just as well to any industry undergoing the kind of creative destruction ushered in by Bill James, Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane. Remember that when you see the next written attack on “stat geeks” who are ruining the game along with a defense of RBIs or pitcher wins.

If you haven’t already done so, go read the book before thinking about seeing this movie, and maybe go watch Brad Pitt steal every scene he’s in in Snatch instead.

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→ September 10, 2011
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Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone was one of the eight hundred, or more accurately ten, nominees for Best Picture in this year’s Academy Awards, and of the six I’ve seen it was pretty clearly the best movie. It wasn’t the most enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d be all that eager to watch it again, but for plot, dialogue, direction, visuals, and key performances, this one edges out The King’s Speech.

Set in a backwoods community somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone focus on Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old girl who is her family’s de facto parent. Her mother is catatonic, and her father, a meth addict and meth maker as well, is out of the picture, leaving Ree in charge of her much younger brother and sister. Ree is barely holding things together with a little help from neighbors when she’s told that her father put up their rickety house and property as bond for his most recent court date and has now disappeared. She has just a few days to locate him or face losing the house.

The search for Ree’s father isn’t the main narrative element in the movie; the court date passes and the narrative splinters into an effort to prove he’s dead (if he is, which Ree doesn’t know for sure) and a few desperate plot strands related to it. The central story is the reactions of Ree’s neighbors, all relatives of hers, some distant, some as close as her father’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), but most of whom stonewall her in her attempts to locate her father. She’s turned away, bought off, threatened, and eventually beaten to try to get her to stop looking.

You could argue Winter’s Bone is about one of two things. One interpretation a few of you offered on Twitter was that the film (based on a novel of the same name) is about finding slivers of humanity in a situation that bears neither physical nor emotional resemblance to anything most people seeing this film would recognize as modern life. Ree’s people are all broken to various degrees; even Teardrop, who shows the most kindness towards Ree over the course of the movie, is a drug addict who tells his wife “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.” No one seems truly good except Ree and her friend Gail (played by Lauren Sweetser, who appears to be one of the many locals cast in various roles in the film, which was shot entirely on location), and even Ree is pushed to the boundaries of her goodness.

I saw the movie much more as a character study of Ree, one that could only succeed if the writing was strong enough and the performance of the actress matched it. Ree’s love for her siblings pushes her forward into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations; the threat of violence doesn’t deter her, and ultimately the evident strength of her resolve forces her antagonists to change their tactics in dealing with her. Nothing shakes her; her dedication to her task on behalf of her siblings is absolute, much like the Man shows for his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And she’s a child who has been prematurely aged emotionally by the horrific circumstances of her home life, let down explicitly by her father and implicitly by her mother (who had a breakdown related to Ree’s father).

Had Jennifer Lawrence been anything less than perfect in her role as Ree, Winter’s Bone would not have succeeded. Her character is so central to the movie that the actress’ credibility as a child who acts in almost every way like an adult is critical, and Lawrence nailed it. She looks young, and of course is dressed to look young, yet projects adult determination and toughness in confrontation after confrontation with the irrational, unfeeling, often intimidating adults who are standing between her and a possible solution to this looming catastrophe. I found her utterly convincing in look, in tone, in timing, and in conveying this very faint hint of vulnerability, or maybe fear – not fear for herself, but fear that she’ll fail. I haven’t seen Black Swan yet, but either Natalie Portman gave a historic performance, or Oscar voters are every bit as subject to the narrative as baseball writers are.

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