The main character of Winter’s Bone (2010), the seventeen-year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is as tough as old boot leather. She lives up in the Missouri Ozarks with her mama, who is physically present but mentally absent, her twelve-year old brother Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and her six-year old sister Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson). Her father, Jessup, has been missing for some time and the story begins when Ree gets told that her father has to show up for court or they’re going to lose their house because he put it up to get the bond for the bail money.
It’s well known that Ree’s father cooks methamphetamine and that he’s been in trouble with the law before. Now that he is missing and the immediate safety of her family is threatened, Ree goes looking for him, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions of some very dangerous people.
Ree is shown right from the start as self-sufficient and strong in the sense that she does what has to be done. In her case that means taking care of her mother and her siblings, chopping wood and hunting squirrel and trying to make ends meet. There are poignant instances where Ree is taking her siblings to school and then looking in through the doors of the classrooms with something like longing in her eyes, showing plainly that she knows what she has to give up for her family.
Ree goes in search of her father, talking to relatives and people her father has had dealings with all over the community. She forms an uneasy alliance with her volatile uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) in trying to get to the truth, though it’s pretty clear right from the get-go that her father is gone for good, if not dead.
One of the more interesting things about this story is that even if the culture is portrayed as predominantly and pretty aggressively patriarchal, the women are given a lot of weight and substance. Most everywhere Ree goes she is greeted at the door by the wives and girlfriends of the men she has to ask questions of, and they are all cast in the same tough-as-nails Cerberus dye. The region’s patriarch Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall) is guarded by his spouse Merab (Dale Dickey), who also delivers an almighty beating to Ree when she won’t stop her investigation.
This is a tale of family, perseverance and doing what has to be done and Ree is undoubtedly a heroine in the most basic and best sense of the word. Jennifer Lawrence gives her portrayal of Ree all the gravitas and subtlety you could hope for, showing both her strength and her weakness, her fear and her deep and abiding sense of loyalty without it ever becoming overly sentimental. This could so easily have tripped into a stereotypical portrayal of degenerate hillbillies and gratuitous poverty porn, but instead each character is shown as doing what they have to do in order to live under extremely harsh conditions. Some manage to rise above their circumstance and some succumb to them. Drugs are in abundance, both as a means of making money and for everyday use and this is presented as a fact of life. The harsh things are snugged up right against the gentle in this tale. The landscape and the color palette shows just how bleak and difficult life is, and it also shows the undeniable haunting beauty of the scarcity of the mountains.
This is a thriller in the best sense of the word. The object is to find out what has happened to Ree’s father, and the viewer is taken along for the ride right up to the inevitable conclusion. What makes this rise above the run of the mill thrillers is that the devil is in the details all the way. The dialogue is sparse, the characters kept true and given context and depth even though they are not explained to death. In amidst of all the violence and danger we are also shown how Ree’s little brother and sister run and play and seem genuinely happy to be together, with no sense that they are deprived of anything essential.
There are visually lyrical moments that underscore the characters themselves without intruding on the story, sometimes in black and white and sometimes in a muted colour scheme that adds to the overall impression created in the narrative. It is gripping and harrowing and reminiscent of true Southern Gothic tales underscored with a sense of almost documentary quality frankness, which makes it well worth watching.
Winter’s Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik stars Jennifer Lawrence (Ree), Isaiah Stone (Sonny), Ashlee Thompson (Ashlee), John Hawkes (Teardrop), Valerie Richards (Connie), Shelley Waggener (Sonya), Garret Dillahunt (Sheriff Baskin), William White (Blond Milton), Lauren Sweetser (Gail), Dale Dickey (Merab), Sheryl Lee (April), Marideth Sisco (Singer at Party) and Ronnie Hall (Thump Milton). Based on the novel of the same name written by Daniel Woodrell.
Article first published as Movie Review Winter’s Bone on Blogcritics.
Shelter (2010) – Multiple Personalities Or Just A Hill Witch Curse? (Yes, You Read That Right.)
May 29, 2011
Article first published as Movie Review: Shelter(2010) on Blogcritics.
Shelter opens on the forensic psychiatrist Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) who seems to have a special interest in multiple personality disorder.. Her evaluation of a criminal who has obviously pleaded insanity sends the gentleman in question to the electric chair. Subsequent conversations between her and her father Dr. Harding (Jeffrey DeMunn) quickly reveal that debunking presumed sufferers from multiple personality disorder is something of a speciality of Cara’s. She is yet to be proven wrong in her estimations. That’s where David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) comes into the equation.
Dr Harding presents Cara with this interesting patient, a young man in a wheelchair who has been found on the street, lost and without any recollection as to how he wound up where he was. What starts as an interesting battle of intellects between Cara and her father quickly turns into something else when David starts switching personalities. His alters, Adam and Wesley, make appearances and Cara is starting to have to question her iron-clad beliefs and assumptions.
So far so good. I am actually with the story up to this point. Multiple personality disorder is a very much discussed phenomena and it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked, but it makes for great entertainment in this kind of setting. The problem here is that this is where this story veers off into the supernatural. People start dying in gruesome, horrendous and very specific ways while Cara investigates the various alters of David only to find that they all existed, and that the young man is not so much disturbed, as possessed.
Okay, fine. I’ll roll with it. So he is possessed and not disturbed. It isn’t until we wind up in the mountains with a bunch of shaggy-looking mountain people and an old hag with the ability to suck a persons soul out and then put it back in that the atmospheric scenery and all-in-all pretty solid performances no longer outweigh the frank silliness of the basic plot. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that makes this too hard to swallow, but I think it’s in part the fact that we started out on fairly solid ground with sharp-witted dialogue and an intriguing concept and suddenly find ourselves in a stereotypical back-water village in the hills that seems to belong in a Tales from the Crypt episode.
David turns out to be a priest whom the mountain witch “Granny” (Joyce Feurring) has put a curse on so that he now has to provide “shelter” for all those souls that have lost their faith in god. That’s the reason why so many different personalities are living in that one body. Then, for whatever reason, David starts going after the various members of Cara’s family and some of her acquaintances as well. It ends up becoming a battle for the souls, with Cara’s daughter, Sammy (Brooklynn Proulx) as the main damsel-in-distress.
There’s a definite risk with making a movie that has a slight case of multiple personality disorder itself. It’s a mystery and a crime story and a thriller and a horror flick all in one, and it switches between these different language codes in a way that could have worked, could have been clever. The performances are strong throughout, Julianne Moore delivers, as does Jeffrey DeMunn as her father and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the various incarnations of whoever is in David’s body at the moment. The problem is more that this devolves into a fairly trite horror movie, nothing particularly original about it, and the twist at the very end isn’t surprising, or even mildly upsetting, at least not to this viewer who saw it coming a mile away.
It fails at going into some of the basic archetypal fears that could have made it truly frightening, like the inherent instability of the human psyche, something we rely no being more writ in stone than it really is, and opt s instead for a vague kind of religious gloss of the old fire-and-brimstone variety, which, again, would have been fine, if it had any kind of lead-in other than the gruesome deaths of the people occupying the preacher’s body. Even the Witch Of The Hills is an archetype that could have been unsettling, but here she isn’t even set up in opposition with the basic Christian morality she is supposed to act in contrast to. Instead it all comes down to having faith in a standard issue Christian god, especially when the chips are down, because if you don’t a rogue damned and hill-witch cursed preacher is going to come and kill you. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t keep any of the promises it made in the opening. This movie is quite simply not as clever as it would like to be. I wouldn’t waste my time with this one.
Shelter (2010) directed by Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein stars Julianne Moore (Cara Harding), Jonathen Rhys Meyers (David/Adam/Wesley), Jeffrey DeMunn (Dr. Harding), Frances Conroy (Mrs. Bernburg), Nathan Corddry (Stephen Harding), Brooklynn Proulx (Sammy), Brian Anthony Wilson (Virgil), Joyce Feurring (Granny Holler Witch), Steven Rishard (Detective Danton), Charles Techman (Monty Hughes) and John Peakes (Dr. Charles Foster).
The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)
June 3, 2010
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?
The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.
Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.
When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.
But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.
There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).
Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.
Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).
If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.
Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.
Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.
Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.
Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.
I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.
In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”
And there it is.
There was more to him, though.
Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;
-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.
That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.
Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.
Mule
Dark Harbor – Where are we going with all this?
April 11, 2010
Dark Harbor (1998) directed by Adam Coleman Howard stars Alan Rickman (David Weinberg), Polly Walker (Alexis Chandler Weinberg) and Norman Reedus (young man).
The Weinberg couple are driving through the rain to catch a ferry when Alexis spots a young man by the roadside. She urges her husband to stop and help and find a bruised and battered young man in need of assistance, who insists on them not calling the police. Through a series of circumstance the young man winds up on the couples island, staying for a few nights and as a result the couples life gets turned upside down.
Okay, so as a summary that looks kind of cliché, right? A couple picks up a drifter and strange things happen. It is cliché.
What’s worse is that this movie is one of those Pinteresque slight-of-hand things. It drags on in its own pace and you feel the tension under the dialogue the whole time, but it isn’t until at the very end that the twist is revealed.
And here’s the catch – once you know what the twist is – the subtlety of the acting and all the little strange things that catch and ping on your radar suddenly make it all better. But – and this is the problem too – you actually don’t get there until the very end of the movie and by the time you do, you actually need to watch it again to really get and enjoy the many little things that these three actors give you along the way.
Reedus is perfectly cast, slim as a whippet, and with something hidden in his brooding eyes, he can seem boyishly innocent and at the same time there’s something vaguely menacing about him, and that’s not only because he carries a knife and lounges around in the background, whittling.
Alan Rickman and Polly Walker play a disaffected couple with so many strange emotional undercurrents going on that there at times seems to be a third party to their every conversation that calls up things like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, not that it’s anywhere near that intense, but still. I find my references sidle towards theater, but that is probably easily explained by the fact that most of the action is just the three of them in various constellations.
Still, that doesn’t mean this is in anyway an untroubled production. There are a couple of blatant goofs that even I react to, and I’m not usually bothered by that stuff. And I would really, really like to have a talk with the person who scored this movie. There are some really smart choices, but mostly the music fails badly. It’s overly dramatic when there truly is no need for it, and that always makes me feel like the film-maker isn’t confident in the material carrying it’s own weight.
There are also a couple of really cheesy camera tricks, like gliding along a corridor to a door while the music tries to build suspense, failing spectacularly.
The biggest problem, though, lies in the fact that in order to fully appreciate and enjoy this movie you have to watch it twice – and it’s not entirely certain that the average viewer will want to. It’s not good enough for that. Hardened movie-watchers, like myself, might but the regular viewer will probably dismiss that notion right out of hand.
It does bring to mind Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) but it’s nowhere near as brutal. It has art house and Noir sensibility and it is, like I said, really well acted, but there are still quite a few things missing. I find myself a little conflicted about the whole thing. That can sometimes be a good thing, but you really have to be in the mood for that sort of challenge.
Mule
The Quiet – Silence is golden… sort of
February 13, 2010
The Quiet (2005) directed by Jamie Babbit stars Camilla Belle as Dot, Elisha Cuthbert (Nina Deer), Edie Falco (Olivia Deer), Martin Donovan (Paul Deer) and Shawn Ashmore (Connor).
It’s not often that you see a teenage girl garrotte a grown man. I must admit that I kind of enjoy it.
Other than that I can see that this is the kind of movie that is bound to cause some problems when it comes to defining category. Stay with me here and I will explain why.
Dot, a deaf/mute girl loses her father and is sent to live with relatives – the Deer family. This is one of those perfect on the surface families. The daughter, Nina, is a cheerleader, the mom works hard at finishing the interior decorating and the father is successful at his job. Dot doesn’t fit in anywhere – at school the cheerleaders dismissively say that not even the freaks want her.
Dot becomes a kind of receptacle for other peoples innermost secrets. Since she does not communicate with the outside world in any way, it is as if the people talking to her are talking to themselves.
Dot is neither deaf, nor mute. She has simply chosen not to speak and pretend that she cannot hear those around her out of loyalty to her father – who was a real deaf-mute.
It’s a very clever premise, especially since her foster family hides some pretty nasty secrets under the sunny cellophane of their picture-perfect front. There is drug use, incest and emotional chaos, all of which Dot witnesses, but because she has set herself apart she cannot do anything about it, other than seethe.
A lot of this movie is set in school and in the climate of what would normally be a teen movie. The high school dance, classes, the basketball game, all these typical settings are used. The scenes that are set in the Deer family home read more like a classical chamber play – especially since the mother can never finish decorating, thus leaving the home environment looking vast and bleak and not very inviting.
The themes of the movie, the tone and the music are at odds with the clichés from teen movies. There is a great distance in how these things are treated that make it look more like a play. Dot’s voiceover is a very good example of enacted alienation with lines like: “All I wanted was to be invisible. It was a simple request. It didn’t involve anyone else. When I was in a room with another person, I felt like I was only half there. When I was in a room with two other people, I felt like a third of myself. When I was in a room with three other people, I felt like a quarter of myself. And when I was in a whole crowd of people, I felt like nobody.”
Dot wants it that way. She wants the distance, still purblind and reacting to the pain of the loss of her father, but she is drawn out by the horrors of the situation she finds herself in.
That distance, that alienation, is one of the things that cause problems in the narrative. It gets transferred a little too well into the general tenure of the movie and that means it makes it difficult for the viewer to relate to. The strongest scenes, to my mind, are the ones where Dot is either alone, or acting as a receptacle through the deceit that she cannot hear or speak.
Camilla Belle is one of those actresses that is not only stunningly beautiful, the camera loves her, but she also has enormous presence. She pulls this off seemingly without breaking a sweat. I, for one, am looking forward to what seeing what the future will bring for her. The accomplished young lady also plays the piano, something that is made good use of in this movie. Edie Falco, of Soprano-fame, plays the numb housewife well here, but it might not be that much of a stretch for her and Martin Donovan is suitable creepy. Elisha Cuthbert is stuck with a more stereotypical role with her blond bouncy cheerleader/victim, but she gives it a leg and an arm.
The incongruity of the overall feel of the movie for me personally comes from the glitch between the teen movie clichés and the many ways in which this is a drama and thriller in a more noir style. I think I would have preferred if it had leaned heavier on the noir language.
It’s still worth watching, if for no other reason than how rare seeing a teenage girl using a piano wire to garrotte someone. Don’t worry – it’s all in context.
Mule
The Dead Girl
November 18, 2009
The Dead Girl (2007) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Toni Collette as Arden, Piper Laurie as Arden’s mother, Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Rose Byrne (Leah), James Franco (Derek), Bruce Davidson (Leah’s father), Mary Steenburgen (Leah’s mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista) Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Kerry Washington (Rosetta), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora).
This is a very complicated and carefully told story that unfolds in five chapters. It starts when Arden finds the body of a dead girl in a field in the rural landscape where she lives with her mother. Arden tells the police and becomes a local celebrity which leads to her being asked out on a date by Rudy who works in a grocery store. Arden is played beautifully as someone who is caught in a stifling and cruel relationship with her ailing mother. She breaks free from that and leaves with Rudy.
The next chapter shows Leah, the morgue attendant who is living with the pain of a missing sister, and the effects of that. The story here is about how the various family members are trying to deal with having had the older daughter gone missing without any resolution. They don’t know if she is alive or dead and they don’t know what happened to her. Leah, who is deeply depressed, just wants it all to be over. Through a series of circumstance she believes the dead girl is her sister and that almost frees her until she finds out she was wrong.
The third chapter deals with a woman whose husband goes away on long road trips and the infected, seriously twisted relationship between husband (Nick Searcy) eventually leads to the wife discovering a storage locker where her absentee husband keeps trophies in the form of bloody clothes and jewellery and things of that nature. The wife (Mary Beth Hurt) understands that her husband is a killer and she has to deal with that knowledge somehow.
The fourth chapter shows the mother of the dead girl, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) trying to understand what happened to her daughter, finding out where she lived, that she worked as a prostitute and that she has a daughter. She works through all this and decides to take care of her granddaughter.
The last chapter shows the dead girl herself, Krista, and her last day. She comes across as a damaged soul in a lot of ways, but she is also stronger than you would think at a first glance, and the viewer gets to see some of that too.
It’s so rare to see a film that actually features women in this way. We’re talking beautiful talent, skilled work and honed dialogue showing actual women as opposed to Barbie dolls, with hard choices to make portrayed with all the depth and fullness that these wonderful ladies are capable of. That alone makes this worth watching. In some ways they are all victims and they all rise above, change their lives and move through the world as best they can.
It’s told in inverted order and without sentimentalism. It’s absolutely fascinating and gut-clenching to watch a performance like Mary Beth Hurts and seeing her make the wrong choice, seeing how poisoned her thinking is from what must be a long and deeply infected relationship. It is a movie about human interaction and all the ways in which women can get caught in bad circumstance just as much as it is a movie about a murder.
Complex, intelligent and completely engrossing without any kind of moral soapbox action this movie gives the manifold leading ladies a chance to show their skills.
How did this movie not win more awards?
Mule
Primal Fear
January 26, 2009
Directed by Gregory Hoblit this 1996 court room drama stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Edward Norton and Frances McDormand.
Gere’s attorney Martin Vail is a vain bastard, that much is obvious right from the get go. He embodies all the characteristics of a lawyer when at the top of his game and obviously his goal here is to defend the innocent, or not so innocent, and look good whilst doing it. He has a conscience somewhere, but he is still basically an ambulance chaser.
When the news of a gory murder hits, Vail is first through the gate to get to defend the young suspect Aaron Stempler. Aaron comes across as sweet, shy and misguided. A young drifter who has been taken in by the local church and then subjected to Archbishop Rushman’s (Stanley Anderson) dubious attention. It turns out that the Archbishop has some interesting habits involving the young people supposedly in the church’s care.
So the altar boy murders a priest and then hides shivering and covered in blood by the railway tracks. The lawyer who normally meets events as a cynical tactician is blindsided by the suspect. Aaron seems to have a mean man in him called Roy. Aaron goes from sweet, stuttering and mild tempered confusion to alpha male in two seconds flat. Roy, the other personality, is the one who takes care of business. He protects Aaron. He killed the priest.
So the defense now switches from “there was a third man in the room” to “there was a third man in the room, but he lives in Aaron’s head”, which is a tricky thing to try and pull off.
This movie has been around for a while and I actually saw it back then and now happened to revisit it. This is Norton’s first big performance and he does pull it off in a way which with the twenty-twenty vision provided by hindsight you can say foreshadows his later performances. It is not particularily memorable movie for any other reason, though, more a basic staple of court room drama, and there has been quite a lot of that.
Strong, solid chracter performances, but not much else. Still very enjoyable in it’s basic bread and butter way.
Mule
The Deep End
November 21, 2008
Scott McGeHee and David Siegel have directed this 2001 drama/thriller staring Tilda Swinton (Margaret), Goran Visnjic (Alek) and Jonathan Tucker (Beau).
The story is basically a tell tale heart surrounding an accidental death. Young Beau, a promising trumpet player has an affair with an older man of questionable moral character. After an ugly scene the older man, Darby Reese (Josh Lucas) falls of a pier and happens to land badly. Very Badly.
Beau’s mother Margaret finds the body and gets rid of it thinking she can protect her son. The family now becomes subject to blackmail from some of the boyfriends unsavoury contacts. They have a video tape of young Beau with his lover and threaten to hand it in to the police unless they recieve 50 000 dollars. The blackmailer Alek (Goran Visnjic) develops a certain sympathy for the family after having help resuccitate the grandfather Jack (Peter Donat).
Despite it’s best intentions this movie does not make it all the way. As long as the suspense is created by Margaret trying to get rid of the evidence and keeping her family together it does well.
Alek, the blackmailer, quite quickly becomes a more sympathetic character, which again, sort of works. He displays obvious concern for Margaret and has an attack of consciousness and I can get behind that. The tension between Margaret and her son, who may or may not be a killer, is nicely understated – they simply can’t communicate about anyhting, much less this. The question of the son’s sexual identity is a huge elephant in the room. So far so good. Margaret desperately tries to raise the money in between being a soccer mom and trying to get hold of her husband who is in the navy and out on a carrier somewhere.
Swinton gives a beautifully understated performance, showing the nerves and offering the blank face of shock while doing what is necessary. Visnjic is a good ganster with a heart of gold. Young Tucker gives a good performance as an angsty, talented but somewhat rebellious teenager.
The problem is that the tempo is uneven and the things that work so well in some scenes, the palpable silence and desperation, becomes campy and stagey in others. Some locations, like the boathouse, feel overly theatrical and the violence is not convincing.
And I simply cannot reconcile myself with the ending. It is not set up well enough for me to believe any of it. I mean, if you are going to sacrifice it has to be more of an involvement than we have here as far as Alek is concerned. Margaret sacrifices, but that is understandable, we are talking about family and she strikes me as someone who will do whatever she has to.
The very last scene depicts Margaret crying in shock and her son Beau comforting her. She tells her son she loves him, and again, I would not mind this as a resolution to the movie, if it wasn’t for the blood and gore.
You just feel the lopsidedness of the events. It is an unhappy mixture of action and drama that tries to be both and neither and winds up failing in all respects, despite solid performances from all the key actors.
Mule
