"Winter's Bone" is one of the best films I've seen thus far in 2010. You don't just watch this film; it seeps into your soul. It's not a perfect film, but at times it is absolutely stellar. Welcome to the upper echelon of American filmmakers, Debra Granik. Considering that this is only Granik's second film, her achievement is all the more stunning.
The speed of her artistic ascent is perhaps at least in part due to the fact that Ms. Granik is not that young. She entered the world of filmmaking as an adult and is now in her later 40s. In the years before she picked up a camera, Granik clearly was thinking deeply about life and developing an exceptional artistic voice. It is cause for celebration that she finally got the courage to get behind the camera and that someone gave her enough money to do it. We owe her investors a debt of gratitude.
Likewise, we have the Sundance Film Festival to thank. They gave "Winter's Bone" their Grand Jury Prize earlier this year, which no doubt helped the film attract a distributor.
If Granik is the breakthrough American director of the year, the 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence (pictured above), who plays the lead character, is the breakthrough American actor of the year. I am reasonably confident that Ms. Lawrence will in six months' time be celebrating her first Oscar nomination.
She plays a teenage girl in a deeply rural corner of Missouri (think Appalachia), where people live in the forest and have houses that are essentially log cabins. Her father has recently disappeared. She is left to fend for herself and take care of her young siblings and catatonic mother. She has to find Dad or she will lose her house. So she goes out on a trek to find out what happened to him, stumbling inadvertently into something very dangerous.
Shot completely on location in the deep woods with a cast that appears to include many locals, "Winter's Bone" is profoundly authentic. You feel transported to the Ozark Mountains. The sounds, the smells, the music, the trees, the ruggedness, the wildlife, the quiet. Debra Granik is a master of ethnographic cinema, capturing on film the feel of the place where her story is set.
She has a gift also for story development, which is so rare these days. She knows a good story when she sees one. But there is room for improvement in her ability to move the story along. There are several passages in "Winter's Bone" that are a bit inert, where the film kind of collapses. It them comes roaring back to life five or 10 minutes later, but there are too many such dead pockets. Granik has work to do in developing her sense of editing. Other than that she is a nearly perfect director.
I look forward to my opportunity to see the deeply soulful, tough, frightening and compassionate "Winter's Bone" a second time.
2 comments:
Did you see her previous film?
I have not. In fact, I had never heard of it until I looked up Granik on IMDB yesterday. ("Down to the Bone," starring Vera Farmiga, 2004.) I am surprised that it also has the word "bone" in the title. That's a pretty bizarre coincidence.
Also surprising is fact that it won two awards at Sundance that year (Directing Award for Granik and Special Jury Prize for Farmiga) and was nom'd for a couple Independent Spirit Awards. I wasn't paying attention to cinema with extreme care that year, but I'm still surprised that I wouldn't have any recollection of the film. I definitely want to rent it.
Let's hope that Granik's third film doesn't also have "bone" in the title! : )
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