The Dead Girl

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

No Country for Old Men

The Cohen brothers adaptation of Cormac McCarthys book with the same title stars Josh Brolin as Llewelen Moss, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh and Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. The movie takes place in Texas and just like with There Will Be Blood the landscape plays an integral part in the movie. Enough that you could list is as a character in itself.

This is one of those movies that are hard to categorise. It’s violent, there are cowboys and drug deals, it’s a road movie and a chase movie. It also has moments of humor and human interaction you actually believe. You could say that it’s a story about three men, one good (Sherif Bell), one bad (Chigurh) and one in between (Moss). Of course nothing is really that simple, because this is a Cohen brothers movie, but that serves as a starting point.

The movie is set in the 80s without any of the now famous horrible 80s pink and shoulder-padded costume. We are deep in the rural back country of Texas where people buy clothes out of a catalog, or just continue wearing whatever they wore for the past ten or twenty years, which lends a sort of contemporary look to the movie, but with a twist. The cowboy hats and checkered shirts set the scene right from the get go.

The acting is thouroughly impressive. Josh Brolin really delivers Llewelyn Moss and gives off the sense of a man who can handle himself in pretty much any situation, has a live intelligence and has just got himself caught in an impossible situation. He handles weapons like any other tool and the few terse comments he makes to himself feel authentic. Javier Bardem is perfect in his out of place haircut and clothes. He gives off a cool menace that is not tempered by any emotion. Chigurh is that much more frightening because he does not raise his voice, betray emotion or even lose his temper. He is like an insect, like a praying mantis, completely alien in his dealings with other people. It seems that for him the easierst way to get rid of an inconvenience is to simply murder the person in front of him. Tommy Lee Jones, who is actually from this region, gets to take his good old boy out of the moth bag and play a sherif who is getting on, has grown a paunch and has seen too much to be able to just shake it off anymore.

Moss’s wife is played by Kelly Macdonald, a scottish actress, but don’t let that throw you. She has the West-Texas accent down so fine you could never tell she is an oddly situated Scottish flower. The scenes between her and Brolin are played with enough subtelty that you get the sense these two really enjoy each other’s company and that’s a tough thing to do in such a short amount of time.

Forget all your conventions. They go right out the window on this one. None of the endings you are prone to expect come about. Nothing gets resolved in any Hollywood kind of way. The action is plenty bloody enough and there are chase scenes and all the rest, but they are so well done that you really don’t know what the outcome is going to be.

The Cohens usually deliver intelligent, unusual material and No Country for Old Men is no exeption. This is one of those movies that are worth every minute of you time and will keep you interested, entertained and just a bit scared without resorting to booming music and big-assed explosions. Actually, on the topic of music, it is used very sparingly, which is great. I can get pretty sick of directors who try to cover their short-comings in an overloud score.

This is a must see. I mean it.

Mule