Two of the best

On two successive evenings, I watched likely Oscar nominees for “Best Picture,” and I found both very much up to the hype.


Winter’s Bone.  Now this is one Sundance prizewinner that I totally endorse.  It deserves the acclaim of its predecessors and more.  Debra Granik’s film does not have any of the deficiencies I saw in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River or Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker.  For me Winter’s Bone worked on many levels, as pulse-pounding suspense, heart-leaping shock, naturalistic portrait of Ozark people and the grimly beautiful landscape they inhabit – film noir meets Southern Gothic.  Adapting a novel I know nothing about, Granik took a small crew and a few professional actors to rural Missouri and recruited the rest of her cast from local folk, a strategy that works wonderfully well, mixing palpable reality with an aura of sympathy and dread.  Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding in the star-making central role as a teenage girl taking care of her younger brother and sister, while looking after her spaced-out mother and tracking down her meth-cooking father, who has disappeared while out on bail, having left the family home as collateral.  Talk about the weight of the world on her shoulders.  But there is nothing frail or shrinking in this young beauty.  Among the fearsome adults she beards in their own dens is her Uncle Teardrop, marvelously rendered by John Hawkes as a scary man with a surprising undercurrent of feeling.  This film could have felt like rural slumming and backwoods exploitation, but instead elicits a classic mix of pity and terror, with respect all round.   (2010, MC-90)


The Social Network.  This acclaimed film stands out most rarely among contemporary American films, in that you’re likely to respond as I did at the end, “Wow, it’s over already?  Those two hours went fast – and full.”  In an era when even the best films seem generally 10-20 minutes too long (unless they cut loose from feature length altogether and run to 5 or 6 – or 10 to 13 -- hours), The Social Network leaves you with an appetite for more.  Credit Aaron Sorkin’s patented rapidfire patter, David Fincher’s swift and sure direction, and excellent acting across the board -- funny, deep, and true characterizations that leave plenty of room for moral speculation.  Jesse Eisenberg comes from two particular favorites of mine, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland, but transcends himself with a brilliantly controlled portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook while a Harvard sophomore and subsequently the “world’s youngest billionaire.”  Andrew Garfield is Eduardo Saverin, the classmate and friend who provides the initial bankroll, but gets squeezed out when the start-up goes bigtime, and sues to get back his stake in the business and co-founder status.  The general assumption is that Saverin is the good guy betrayed, and Zuckerberg the arrogant selfish bastard with no social skills, who hacked his way to “Friends” across a network because he couldn’t keep them in person.  I take it as evidence of the subtlety of both characters’ portrayal that I could come to see the conflict in just the opposite way, with smooth operator Saverin trying to exploit the brilliance of his obsessive friend’s monomania.  I think every character in the film comes across with a piquant mix of sympathy and satire, even Justin Timberlake’s all-stops-out portrayal of Internet wunderkind Sean Parker.  I was totally into this movie, from the close-up head-to-head first scene between Jesse/Mark and his down-to-earth BU girlfriend, which ends with her walking out of The Thirsty Scholar, a pub near Inman Square, just around the block from where my son lived last year.  So I reveled in the familiar Cambridge vibe, despite the film’s slightly overwrought view of the scene.  And I loved the contrast between the dark wood paneling and three-hundred-year-old doorknobs of Harvard, and the glassed-in funhouses and playpens of Silicon Valley.  I find the widespread comparisons of this film to Citizen Kane quite plausible, and think it likely to deserve every award it wins.  (2010, MC-95)