Mother

I’ll level with you: I watched Mother curled up on the couch, wracked with stomach cramps while my body either expelled or adapted to some new microbe I ingested at an Arabian Shawarma shack.  Perhaps I’m not the most reliable person to consult regarding this film.

Yet I enjoyed it, as best I could.  Mother tells the tale of the mother of a mentally retarded young man who has been accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  This sounds like the setup for a standard detective story, but here’s the twist: Mother is a little, well, off.  She seems awfully devoted to her son and sufficiently unhinged that I wouldn’t want to stand in her way. 

The film delights in hooking us into the mystery while creeping us out with its protagonist.  I attribute its success to Hye-ja Kim, who plays Mother.  She’s canny yet naïve, loving and ruthless (I first wrote loving but ruthless, but those traits often go together.).  She’s fascinating, and Kim does an amazing job of bringing her to life. 

I don’t wish gastrointestinal difficulties on anyone.  But if, like me, you have a weakness for roadside grills, you can do worse than Mother to get you through it.  Enjoy, I guess.

Dinner for Schmucks

I hated Dinner for Schmucks.  Hated it, hated it, hated it.  The movie’s a fraud.

Here’s the deal.  Paul Rudd is career-oriented guy on the way up.  This means, of course, that by the end he’ll throw it all away and only then be ready for true love because he’s in a romantic comedy.  Steve Carrel is an idiot.  I’m talking about a deeply, deeply stupid man.  For Rudd to ascend to the next rung on the socioeconomic ladder, he must find an idiot and bring him to the titular dinner, where rich people mock idiots for their amusement.  Because that’s the kind of thing rich people do because they’re in a romantic comedy.

Ok so far.  We know where this will go: Carrel will reveal himself to be a font of wisdom and courage, Rudd will find his moral compass and get the girl, and we’ll all feel better about ourselves because the film will confirm our suspicion that we aren’t rich because we aren’t morally bankrupt. 

But here’s the underlying structural problem of the film:  it wants us to sit in judgment on those who laugh at the stupid, but it devotes almost all of its running time to laughing at the stupid.  It’s like Dinner for Schmucks is saying, “They can’t laugh at dumb people, because it’s morally wrong.  We, however, can laugh all we want because, well, because we paid our money, godammit, and we want comedy.”

I didn’t laugh.  I just felt alternately sorry for and angry with everyone involved in this film.  How stupid do you have to be read this script and not see its profound hypocrisy?

Winter's Bone

WINTER’S BONE is one of the scariest, most horrifying films I’ve seen all year.  And it isn’t even a horror movie.

Ree Dolly lives in a dirt road cabin in rural Missouri.  Just seventeen, she cares for her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother.  Her father’s a felon, a meth cooker, and he posted the cabin and land for his most recent bail bond.  The sheriff comes around to tell her that her dad jumped bail.  She has about a week to either find him or clear off.  Nobody cares that she and her charges have nowhere to clear off to.

None of which is scary or horrifying.  It’s sad, and it’s compelling, but the scary and horrifying part comes later, when she starts looking.  See, Ree Dolly has deep roots in Southern Missouri.  She’s related, one way or another, to nearly everyone who might know where her father is.  Problem is, she’s from an extended family of drug makers, drug dealers, and drug takers.  Her people, the only people she has, treat her with hostility, suspicion, and fear.  Yes, there are some bright spots, but this young woman lives in a universe so full of secrets and violence that even her closest allies think nothing of threatening and intimidating her not because they have particular cause to, but because it’s the only way they know how to deal with people.

WINTER’S BONE combines this poisonous social atmosphere with the cold, icy, wet, and dead milieu of wintertime among the rural poor in Southern Missouri.  Ree’s increasing desperation combines with the brutality of her physical and social worlds to create a sense of claustrophobia, hopelessness, dread, and even fear.  When her quest culminates in an episode of jaw-clenching, gut-roiling horror, we’re left aghast and destroyed.

This is amazing stuff.  Jennifer Lawrence gives Ree such hard-edged, desperate, and even mean humanity that we feel for her and we root for her, even though we may not necessarily like her.  The supporting cast, particularly Deadwood’s John Hawkes as an uncle who’d be a nightmare in anyone’s family and Dale Dickey, a second or third cousin who’s even worse, flesh out a world of bitter, hard, and variably moral people that felt utterly authentic and absolutely scary.

As I think of it, I can’t recall a foot WINTER’S BONE puts wrong.  This film will find a place on my top ten of 2010.