Monthly Archives: July 2010

“Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

One of the things I’ve come to love about Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the sheer effrontery of the way it re-writes the end of World War II. All movies about history are fiction, Tarantino seems to be (truthfully) saying, so let’s wallow in that freedom. Anyone who watches movies for history lessons deserves what they get. Or to quote another film by another filmmaker, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Myth of Hypatia–and Carl Sagan relates a myth, not historical fact–is a kind of Rorschach test. Are you a bibliophile? Then this is a horror story. Are you a feminist? Then this is a portrait of the patriarchy at one of its lowest moments. Are you a scientist? Then this is a parable about academic freedom. Are you an atheist? Then this is your worst fears about religion made flesh. What you take from this is in large part what you bring to it. The atheist in me has a few problems with this, because one of the core questions an atheist needs to ask herself is this one: do you care that what you believe is true? As it turns out, this particular atheist does care, so The Myth of Hypatia is a bit of a disappointment to me. No matter how much I may want this story to arm me against the religious and the superstitious, it’s bullshit and I can’t in good conscience use bullshit as ammunition against bullshit.

This disappointment does not extend to Alejandro Amenabar’s recounting of the myth in Agora (2009), however. Because, you know, it’s a movie, and just like Tarantino, Amenabar is rewriting history for his own ends (though he rewrites considerably less than Sagan even as he adds romantic subplots). I don’t have to care if a movie is true. I only care if it’s good theater. Continue reading →

“Ain’t you got no men to do this?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,”

Movies don’t usually have an overt thesis statement, but this exchange from Debra Granik’s stark indie hit, Winter’s Bone, serves pretty well.  It’s a familiar kind of movie–it’s a hard-boiled detective film–with unfamiliar trappings. We don’t get the mean streets of the city at night. The movie is set in the Ozarks. And we don’t get the cynical, hard-drinking private eye, either. Rather, we get a seventeen-year-old girl who is just trying to keep her family together. We do, however, get most of the plot points of film-noir detective film, but given the other elements of the film, it all seems fresh and new. Certainly, the power dynamics are different when you have a poor teenage girl rather than a hardened detective, but she perseveres with the same stubbornness and moral rectitude of a Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer.

This film is also a portrait of the wreckage left by late capitalism, envisioned by the film as a stark winter of discontent, possibly as a new dark age where established institutions like law and education have completely failed and where the feral world of drug trafficking has taken their place. Granik and her cinematographer, Michael McDonough, capture all of this in a cold, desaturated style that casts its setting as vaguely post-apocalyptic. This is the world that men have wrought, the film suggests, and the men are absentee landlords, either literally as in the case of our heroine’s missing father, or figuratively as weak, venal characters. Women are left to clean it all up, and frankly, it’s a shit job.

Ree Dolly, played by the a-MAY-zing Jennifer Lawrence, is this film’s version of the private eye, and a more unlikely candidate for the job is hard to imagine. At least Marlow and Archer had contacts and the resources of their clients. Ree has only her own determination. This doesn’t stop the film from throwing her into those brutal situations in which hard-boiled detectives sometimes find themselves. It doesn’t stop the goons in the employ of the film’s bad guys from kicking the shit out of her. In the traditional hard-boiled story, these kinds of scenes are designed to show how tough the detective is, and to knock the detective so far down that it seems that there’s no way back up. It serves the same function here, but the inequality between the opponents throws it into even starker contrast. Ree’s major antagonist is Merab, played with stony resolve by Dale Dickey. In a lot of ways, she’s Ree’s doppelganger, in so far as she’s stubborn and not above getting her hands dirty. She, too, is cleaning up the messes left by her men folk.  It seems oxymoronic to claim Merab as a feminist villain (meaning that she’s not a villain because she’s a feminist, by the way), but here she is. Both characters function as everywomen, as two sides of the same coin.

The auteurist in me looks at this movie and compares it to Granik’s first film, the similarly titled Down to the Bone, in which Vera Farmiga plays a rural housewife and mother struggling with drug addiction. Like that film, Winter’s Bone is bracingly unglamourous. Like that film, it links poverty with drug addiction as inextricably linked. Like that film, it’s about a woman trying to keep her family from getting sucked into the downdraft. Both films find the kind of stark beauty in poverty that one finds in depression era photography. Auteurs in the purest sense tend to make the same movie over and over again. It appears that Granik is doing exactly that, but she’s discovered, like many directors before her, that she can smuggle her thematic concerns to a wider audience by framing things in terms of genre. That’s the main difference between her two films. She links Winter’s Bone to the plot and visual style of a film noir thriller, while she was content to just turn her camera on the characters in Down to the Bone and let them play things out without genre archetypes. Good as Down to the Bone might be (and it IS very good), I think Winter’s Bone is probably stronger for it.  It lets the story set the hook, then it reels the audience in for the rest.

Winter’s Bone should still be in theaters. Down to the Bone is on DVD and is currently available for instant streaming from Netflix.

–Dr. Morbius