Martha Marcy May Marlene

NOTE:  This contains a spoiler.  The spoiler won’t be about the story, but about how the story is told.  If you read this, you won't learn less about the plot than you would in most professional reviews.  However, you’ll learn about an element of the film’s structure that I don’t think the filmmakers want you to know up front.


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"Tell me a story."  It’s what we want films to do.  Take us away, capture our imagination, perhaps expand our mind.  Begin it.  Develop it.  Let it reach its climax.  Craft a satisfying denoument.  This is how stories go.  This is how we’re wired to hear them.  This is what we want.


Martha Marcy May Marlene begins with a young woman’s escape from a back-to-the-land cult.  It’s the climax of a story that began when she joined, one we get in flashback as we watch the story of her reintegration unfold.  That story begins when Marcy moves in to her sister’s place.  It develops.  It reaches an unsatisfying climax.  Then, just when we think we're in the denoument, it indicates a fuller, better climax is still on the way.  Next - whammo!  Black screen.  Roll credits.  What the heck?


So Martha Marcy May Marlene only tells us part of a story.  I'm sure the filmmakers had their reasons.  "Ambiguity is good."  "People will have something to discuss after they leave the theater."  "We like screwing with our audience."  I'm not buying it.  In the words of noted sage Sammy Hagar:


C'mon, baby.  Finish what you started.
I'm incomplete!

Contagion

I used to work at a place that did professional wargaming.  Not the kind with little paper chits and 20-sided dice, but the kind in which we got a bunch of smart and capable people in a room, threw them a scenario, and analyzed how they did (or didn’t) work together to deal with the situation.  Contagion feels like a dramatization of one of those wargames.

The scenario: a highly contagious, deadly virus comes out of Macau, borne abroad by several of the thousands of international travelers who pass through in a given week.  It propagates around the world exponentially.  Player #1: you’re an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization.  Player #2: you’re the head of the CDC.  Player #3: Homeland security.  Player #4: a suburban city councilwoman at the American center of the epidemic.  Go.

Does it work in the film?  Yeah.  Likeable stars like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Lawrence Fishburne put faces to dilemmas, helping us humanize the scope of the epidemic and empathize with their respective ethical and professional challenges.  The stories weave together fluidly, each informing the others and catching us up in their combined narrative.  The film rockets along and never feels like the dull procedural it could have become.  Contagion challenged and fascinated me, making me feel like I was back in the room of one of those wargames, moving things along and learning from the process.

Grim as the film’s subject matter surely is, I found it to be intellectually and emotionally satisfying.  I walked out thinking, “That’s how it could really play out.  Nice work.”  I haven’t changed my mind, even if I have changed my habits: I’m washing my hands more.

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.