Feminéma’s Best of 2010: “Winter’s Bone”

Living outside of New York, LA or Chicago means I haven’t had the chance to see a lot of this year’s critics’ picks for best film, like Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, Mike Leigh’s Another Year, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. Even given those gaps, however, I want to make an argument for Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone as the year’s best film and as the right film for the award during a hard year of financial crisis and jobless recovery.

I could have chosen a film that exemplified the movies’ capacity to tell great stories that take us outside ourselves to that place of pleasure and wonder. Winter’s Bone might not have been so feel-good, but it was just as great a tale as Toy Story 3, True Grit, The Kids Are All Right, or The King’s Speech.  It made a better and more unpredictable thriller than Black Swan or A Prophet, and much, much better than The Ghost Writer, Shutter Island, and Inception.

In my mind, its real battle is with David Fincher’s The Social Network, a battle it will surely lose. The Social Network benefits from a timely story, massive ticket sales, an all-star directing/writing/production team, and — let’s face it — the focus on dudes and those epic battles involving testosterone and enormous sums of money that make voters for the Academy cream their pants. In contrast, Winter’s Bone has a little-known female director and co-writer, an unknown female lead who doesn’t prettify herself, and an all-poverty setting in the Missouri Ozarks where meth dealing and squirrel-eating are ways of life. The film appeared in theaters all the way back in July rather than late this fall. In short: no matter how much it might be the better film, or at least just as good as The Social Network, Winter’s Bone doesn’t have a chance.

But here’s why we should vote for it: because it tells one of the real stories of 2010: of poor people clinging on by their fingernails. It doesn’t have lines like “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” (And here I’m thinking about how much I objected last March to the fact that Sandra Bullock beat out Gabourey Sidibe for best actress — a choice that reveals our determination to feel good at the movies.) The story it tells — of a teenaged girl trying to keep her family together with a roof over their heads — doesn’t distract us from our own problems, sure, but that’s why the film’s terrific storytelling and perfect cast are so crucial. The fact that she succeeds in the end makes it even more appealing for our troubled times than the deeply ambivalent conclusion of The Social Network.

I have other reasons for pushing the film. In the wake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director win at the Academy Awards for The Hurt Locker, 2010 turned out to be a comparatively great year for female directors — with Nicole Holofcener, Lisa Cholodenko, Coppola, and Granik releasing top-notch films. But unlike last year, there’s little grassroots movement to push female-directed films into the top level of competition for an Oscar, no matter how superior their films might be. For me, the battle isn’t won until women are nominated more often, and when women directors get nominated for films that have women in them. (Just like it was great in 1981 to get the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice with Sandra Day O’Connor, but even better when Ruth Bader Ginsberg brought a feminist consciousness to the Court in 1993, a choice that truly benefited other women.)

• Best film:  Winter’s Bone
• Best director:  Debra Granik for Winter’s Bone
  
• Best female actor:  Kim Hye-ja for Mother (Korea, dir. Bong Joon-ho)
• Best male actor:  Colin Firth for The King’s Speech
• Best female supporting actor:  Dale Dickey for Winter’s Bone
• Best male supporting actor:  Matt Damon for True Grit

I have more to say about what a great year it was for interesting female parts and terrific female acting — my choices for best actress and supporting actress were really hard to narrow down, whereas Firth simply has no competition for best actor. But that’ll wait till another time. In the meantime I’m going to keep arguing for Winter’s Bone, and I hope you do too.

“Downton Abbey” (2010)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a professor staring down the gun barrel of a new semester must be in want of an English costume drama. Clearly, the ITV series Downton Abbey has been offered for medicinal purposes — if for no other reason than the 1910s costumes themselves, which are the most luscious I’ve seen since The Forsyte Saga. (Need to get caught up? You can see the first episode here at the PBS website; the following episodes will air Sundays on most local affiliates.) Many thanks to my Dear Friend whose post got me started.

If period dramas and great outfits aren’t enough on their own to titillate your interest, there’s Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, and a large cast of faces familiar even to those of you who only make occasional forays into British film and TV. It seems that all period dramas are necessarily oriented around a courtship story; and all courtship stories set in the past seem to revolve around money and inheritance — in those respects at least Downton Abbey treads familiar ground. But it also adds the Upstairs/Downstairs (aka Gosford Park) element by throwing much of its attention to the estate’s many servants, individuals who can be loyal to a fault but who also harbor resentments and agendas of their own. The show’s producers have planned a second season and will reportedly start filming in March — so the medicine keeps coming, baby.

The family is in mourning for two cousins who died on the Titanic — and not just any cousins. One was the male heir due to inherit the Downton estate upon the death of the current Lord Grantham (Bonneville), and his son was due to marry Grantham’s daughter Mary (Michelle Dockery, above) to keep the estate within the family. The need to mourn their deaths means that within the first 30 minutes we find ourselves gazing at the best mourning jewelry ever — those deep black chiseled beads that signaled one’s sorrow, yet were elaborate, sexy items on their own, thus undermining the whole “mourning” thing. And indeed, Mary was a reluctant fiancée, so she’s not sorry to be released from an arranged marriage (and she can hardly wait to get out of her black clothes at the end of the mandated 3-month mourning period). We can look forward to more rebellion from her, it’s clear — as well as from her younger sister, Edith, whose disapproval of Mary has the potential to grow into something well-nigh treasonous. Even more important is the arrival of the new heir, a young lawyer raised in a solidly middle-class setting who holds no truck with having butlers, valets, and maids do all the work for him.

Plot developments like those prompt more exploration of the unique hierarchies, politics, and intrigues of the downstairs staff. American films virtually never explore the psychological micro-effects of class on the people who work for the wealthy — we rely on film imports for those stories — so watching these tales is fascinating. And even better that the wonderful Brendan Coyle (above, also known for his work as Higgins in North & South) plays John Bates, the new valet whose presence causes such a stir downstairs. Coyle is so good at showing us his quick intellect even when he’s expressing perfect deference to social superiors — he clearly brought his brain to work with him on this series, as usual.

This Sunday night appointment makes a great excuse to get those damn syllabi under control by then; hope you enjoy it, too.

Two spaces after a period

Because of this story in Slate, I realize I’m hopelessly behind the times, typographically speaking. Apparently my use of two spaces after a period is not just a quaint holdover from my high school typing class, but a hugely annoying trait that drives editors insane.  What can I say?  I spend so much time working in Word, and the two-space thing just makes sentences easier to read, if you ask me … I know, I’ve dated myself.  Anyway.  This will be my last post using the two-space rule, as I grouchily come to grips with a brave new typographical world.

The great desk unraveling

Syllabus preparation for the new semester is now in full panic mode.  It begins with frantic, easily distracted fumbling with books and xeroxes on a crowded desk; shifts to self-recrimination and urgent need for snacks; and is now mired in the search for the guilty.  So this is a just a placeholder noting that you should all see The King’s Speech (2010) and that once I finally get that copy of The Wrestler (2009) I intend to finish my paean to Marisa Tomei.  In the meantime, I return to my unholy alchemy using all those books, the calendar, assignment idea fragments, a crazy file full of clippings and confusing notes to myself, and a Word document open on my laptop — somehow, surely, this will all magically transform into class gold.

“Greenberg” (2010): misogynistic, unbearable.

Normally I focus on movies as if I’m having sex with them:  I open up all my perceptive faculties and focus intently.  But during Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg I had to sit with my laptop and send a few angry emails.  And in retrospect I am even angrier that this is on anyone’s Top Ten list (and it is); it’s an exercise in female self-degradation akin to watching Chasing Amy (1997) or In the Company of Men (also 1997). I’m especially angry because Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) is such a good film, and because Greta Gerwig (below) is so talented in contrast to Ben Stiller, whose main contribution is that he allows himself to be neither as attractive nor as slap-your-knee funny as in all his other vehicles.

When the movie just focuses on Gerwig’s face, it sings.  In a number of shots we simply watch her character, Florence, in a series of un-selfconscious moments — driving, for example, and looking expectedly at other drivers as she waits for them to let her merge — scenes she handles with such utter charm that we get to know her even without dialogue.  In fact, she spends much of her time driving, as she works as a personal assistant for the wealthy Greenberg family.  But then the narrative takes her down into the pit of hell via a semi-relationship with the vile, much older Roger Greenberg (Stiller), her employer’s brother visiting from New York, who wants her but doesn’t want her.  She doesn’t even want him, yet she makes herself available to him time and time again in scenes that truly rank among the most unpleasant sex scenes of the year.  I find this film all the more disturbing because it was co-written by Jennifer Jason Leigh, an actor I’ve always loved and followed, and who has a very small role here.

Please don’t tell me I just didn’t get it — that Baumbach was trying to make me angry, that he’s trying to make us ask questions about why young, insecure women might subject themselves to relationships with fucked-up, middle-aged assholes.  No, this film wants us to care about Roger’s rehabilitation by the end of the movie, and to see Florence merely as one part of that process.  Roger may be a complicated and unlikeable character, but the minute he shows up he supplants Florence as protagonist and anti-hero.  This is nothing like Nicole Holofcener’s brilliant and much-misunderstood Friends With Money (2006), which begged questions about women who feel the need to be nice.  No, this is just a mean-spirited opportunity to trace a man’s personal crisis.  Get it off your Top Ten lists and nominations rosters.  I can’t believe Winter’s Bone has to compete with this.

Blood libel

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the protagonist Tomas hears Czech political leaders of the 1960s claiming to be innocent because they did not know the true effects of their actions — and it reminds him of the tale of Oedipus.  When Oedipus learned he had been sleeping with his own mother, he did not loudly proclaim his innocence.  Unable to live with what he had done — however unknowingly — he gouged out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.  With that classic myth in mind, Tomas is furious with his own leaders’ unwillingness to acknowledge guilt for having wrought terrible outcomes:

As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt?  How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done?  How is it you aren’t horrified?  Have you no eyes to see?  If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

Sarah Palin could have done the right thing:  acknowledge that her crosshairs poster may have been irresponsible, and apologize for it.  Certainly it received criticism long before Jared Loughner’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona on Saturday.  Certainly critics made it clear long ago that such a poster was irresponsible due to the widespread, if less catastrophic, violence perpetrated by many individuals during the summer and fall of 2009; and they likewise criticized the broader culture of overheated right-wing rhetoric encouraging violence, such as Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment solutions.”

Instead, Palin issued a video comment today that denied all culpability and claimed the crown of free speech for herself and her Tea Party compatriots.  In fact, she lashed out with such vitriol against critics that she used the term blood libel to refer to criticism against her.  “Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.  That is reprehensible,” she says.  It’s a move she has made before:  I can say whatever I like because of free speech in America; but when you criticize me you are guilty of crimes that are immoral and possibly illegal. In using blood libel she likens herself to Jews who, for centuries, suffered violent persecution due to vicious lies claiming that they killed Christian children and used their blood in religious ceremonies.  In drawing such a bizarre analogy — implying that she has somehow suffered the same persecution as Jews of the past millennium — Palin should be ashamed.  The attempted assassination of a political figure is no time to claim persecution for engaging in free speech.  Sharron Angle goes even further to turn this into an opportunity to heighten the rhetoric:  “The irresponsible assignment of blame to me, Sarah Palin or the Tea Party movement by commentators and elected officials puts all who gather to redress grievances in danger.”  Have you no eyes to see?

We have no clear evidence that Jared Loughner was inspired by the Palin crosshairs poster, and I’m certainly not accusing her of indirectly contributing to the Giffords shooting.  But unlike Oedipus, who was wholly innocent, Palin has heard criticism of her overheated rhetoric ever since she and John McCain were forced to start denouncing the racist, anti-Obama slurs that got thrown around at their campaign rallies in 2008.  More generally, critics have long warned that hysterical political rhetoric contributes to a broader culture of violence now just as much as it did during the 1960s, the last terrible era of political assassinations.  The fact that Palin felt the need to explain her “taking up arms” comments — “When we say ‘take up our arms,’ we are talking about our vote,” she says in the video — signals the tortured logic of one who should know better.

As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt?  How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done?  How is it you aren’t horrified?  Have you no eyes to see?  If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

I don’t understand why major figures like Palin cannot step back from the abyss, why they refuse to see the power and respect they might command by taking responsibility and changing the national conversation.  I don’t understand how an event like this can leave someone eager merely to claim innocence.  I don’t understand why we cannot collectively feel a sense of shame and loss, and through that fire become a better and more responsible nation.

Female rockers: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains” (1981)

“I’m perfect, but nobody in this shithole gets me, cuz I don’t put out!” yells the lead singer of The Stains, Corinne (a very young Diane Lane) to an unhappy audience.  A local news anchor later objects to that anthem, telling Corinne, “It doesn’t make sense to wear a see-through blouse and no bra and say ‘I don’t put out.'”  But Corinne’s got an answer to that:  she snaps back in her characteristically surly tone, “That’s not what it means.  It means don’t get screwed.  Don’t be a jerk; don’t get had.”  It doesn’t matter, really, whether the 30-something anchor buys it (actually, she does):  Corinne’s female fans go berserk with this profound statement and mimic everything she does.  Even more important than wearing see-through tops is to mimic Corinne’s hair:  they dye it two-tone, and call themselves Skunks.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains makes a great cult punk movie, and that goes for more than the fashion and the hair.  Most of all, it’s got a crazily appealing feminist screed at the center that makes it look far more radical than last year’s The Runaways.  It’s also stacked with good actors at the beginning of their careers.  Lane was 15 when the film was shot, still only a year or so out from her little-girl début in A Little Romance (1979) and long before her descent into middle-aged chick-flick pablum; she was backed up by a 13-year-old Laura Dern, Ray Winstone, and Christine Lahti, all still basically unknown.  And those are only the actors.  Paul Simonon from the Clash, ex-Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook, and The Tubes’ Fee Waybill and Vince Welnick all populate the film and alternately mock themselves and put on a good show.  The music is great, and those skunk hairdos — damn, I would’ve dyed my hair too in 1981 if I’d known.  The thing is, no one knew about this movie — it received no theatrical release at all until 1985, and only in the late 80s and 90s did it gain its true/cult audience by means of late-night screenings on cable TV.  Is this a great example of film art?  No.  Does it offer an interesting take on women, feminism, music, and the media nevertheless?  Damn straight.

If there’s one thing Corinne has learned in her short, unhappy life in that miserable Pennsylvania factory town, it’s that the older generation doesn’t have much to offer her.  But she’s also learned that no matter how old people view her, people of her own generation respond to what she says.  The opening scene consists of Corinne being interviewed on a local TV station about her disaffection with the world:  as the interviewer tries to discredit her, she simply snarls at him, refuses to succumb to his girl-gone-bad narrative, and slowly paints herself with vivid red eyeshadow (is that where Lady Vengeance got it from?).  Perhaps due to that experience, Corinne treats the media as yet another adversary.  But no matter how much middle-aged TV anchors might disapprove, her words speak to a world of young girls:  “She said things I’ve always wanted to say, but wasn’t able to,” gushes one be-skunked acolyte.  And when a woman TV reporter begins to champion her in the news, she reports that Corinne has articulated something new:  “the power of young girls to resist life as we know it.”

That’s why this makes a great cult film — those glimpses beyond the film’s flaws to a message of resistance that speaks to a grassroots audience.  Even more specific:  for girls to resist.  The dialogue may not be Shakespeare, but it’s always surprising and actually weirdly riveting.  Critics have mentioned this film’s influence on the Riot Grrls of the 90s, but let’s be historically specific here:  even if this message resonated later on, the early 80s was a nightmare for both feminists and nonconformists, at least in sad-sack remote locales like the rural Pennsylvania depicted here.

I want to be careful in touting its feminism, as this film like all other similar films curtails and “complicates” the feminist message, ending up  ambivalent about both Corinne’s and her fans’ possibilities for liberation.  But the film’s 80s-era ambivalence about female resistance still looks radical by today’s standards.  When Corinne yells out a bunch of questions to her female audiences — “What’s so wonderful about getting married?” — they scream back, “Nothing!”  And we know for certain by the end of the film that even if The Stains won’t always reject mainstream values, they’ve lit a fire for at least some of their fans.

It’s exhilarating to see Lane use her narrow eyes and pouty lips to such unsmiling effect, particularly after all those recent rom-coms in which she seems too eager to please.  Most of all it’s great to see an alternate message about why girls turned to rock music as liberation from social expectations, a theme The Runaways seemed to miss entirely.  Written by top-shelf, Oscar-winning screenwriter Nancy Dowd (of Slapshot, among others) with help from consulting journalist Caroline Coon, who’d documented the London punk movement of the late 70s, the story of the film’s creation and disappearance is almost as interesting as the film itself — and has been told in a 2000 documentary available on YouTube.  In fact, Dowd ultimately removed her name from the film due to pervasive sexual harassment on the set.  It got no video release; fans taped copies off TV and passed them around amongst themselves; somehow members of Nirvana, Bikini Kill, and Hole became big fans and even considered recording covers of the film’s songs.  Eventually the film made its way to the art-house circuit and got itself onto DVD in 2008.  So watch Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains with a healthy dose of generosity; but I still think you’ll be impressed and surprised.  In the end, isn’t that one of the reasons we keep watching?

Magical mini-moments in movies

Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether a film succeeds as a whole, but whether a scene or mini-moment sticks in your mind long afterward.  For me it can be the quality of light shining on a woman’s hair that makes me marvel at the filmmaker’s craft.  Or it might be the way the camera pans to take in a streetscape, or perhaps one of those mini-acting moments that’s so unexpected and delightful that it leaps out like 3D from an otherwise flat movie.  That was my experience watching Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) last night and marveling at what Amanda Plummer did with a small role.  It was supposed to be Robin Williams’ movie:  he was coming off big hits with Cadillac Man and Awakenings the previous year and was about to strike kid-movie gold with Hook.  But Plummer stole it from him with her physical comedy as Lydia — the clumsiest, most un-selfconscious, prickly, and awkward woman in the history of film, a performance worthy of some kind of Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd award.  She achieved this nearly without dialogue.

Plummer’s face is all angles, except for that strawberry bob of hair that falls into her face such that Gilliam nearly always shoots her from the left.  There’s little perceptible makeup and her mouth, a hard line, is nearly always clamped shut in a way that conveys the grim resolution of a woman who knows she has few attractions.  Yet it’s because of her awkwardness that Williams (driven mad by his wife’s death and who is now a visionary homeless man) has fallen in love after watching Plummer simply navigate, nearly unsuccessfully, her daily routine.  Aided by Jeff Bridges and Mercedes Ruehl, he manages to go out for Chinese food with her one night.  Note:  you can cut out when Williams starts to sing — instead, watch Plummer’s command of the first 2½ minutes using nothing but that determined cock of her head and her badly-managed chopsticks:

If I had the capacity to excerpt films myself I’d show you my other favorite scene, which traces Plummer’s lunchtime routine through New York crowds, revolving doors, and collapsing stacks of books.  Instead I’ll remind you of Gilliam’s magical scene at Grand Central Station, in which the smitten Williams sees Plummer and begins to imagine the throngs around them breaking into a waltz.

In the meantime, I wonder whether I might start the most eccentric list of all time:  favorite mini-moments in film.  Tell me your suggestions.

Lena Horne sings Stormy Weather

From the 1943 film of the same name, inspired as I get ready to attend a women’s breakfast (see here for a cranky rant by me and others about the pattern of women’s breakfasts at professional meetings).  Oh Lena, how do you look so good if it keeps rainin’ all the time?  Note:  I do love those carefully constructed 1940s hairdos, but I’m so glad I don’t have to construct one on my own head before I leave my hotel room.

Constance Bennett, who made it work

The thing about Hollywood stars is the real-life unhappiness that contrasts with the on-screen glamor.  You read a few biographies and you see the pattern of multiple marriages, suicides, institutionalization, loss of riches, miserable children.  Constance Bennett seems to have been a striking exception.  Somewhat forgotten now, she was a terrific comic actress best known for Topper (1937) but she appeared in many more delightful 1930s romantic comedies.  Sure, she married five times — but I want to celebrate her for being a smart businesswoman, canny poker player, and — apparently — a happy woman, a woman who was interested in what she did.Bennett earned a lot of money, but unlike the rest she knew how to manage it.  “She’s the shrewdest woman in the picture industry,” her investment adviser had said of her, according to her 1965 New York Times obituary.  “She knows the earning power and dividend record behind every bond and every share of stock she owns.”  Between her high salary (by the late 20s she was making $30,000 a week, possibly more than any other star) and her business sense, she cultivated a persona of the amused outsider — a persona you can see in so many of her films and photographs, in which she seems to cast a knowing, rolling-her-eyes look at us.  Are we in on the joke?  Probably not, as she was a far better poker player than we are, and who knows what she was really doing with that look?  By the end of her life, married to an Air Force colonel and installed in Colorado Springs, she “joined in card table sessions that lasted through the night and past sunrise.”  The notion of this late-fifties star at a card table at an Air Force base, wearing her trademark gold barrette in her hair and waving the matching cigarette holder, delights me to no end.

Bennett (right) with Loretta Young

“If there’s a secret to it, it’s working like a beaver to be happy,” Bennett said before her death, during a time when she’d begun to reappear in a few films, drawing notices for her hard work and surprisingly youthful appearance.  “What I mean is I’ve always been interested in everything I did, or else I wouldn’t do it.  When you’re that interested in anything you’re happy.”

Words to the wise, Connie.  Time to balance the checkbook — and then remind myself that I share her voracious interest in what I do.