mdh310 Reviews

Winter's Bone (2010)

Fine lead performances and formidable atmosphere let down by patchy script and amateur bit players

[7/10 · 8 July 2010]

This one didn't quite gel for me. Heavily in its favor are the grim but beautifully rendered setting (it was shot almost entirely on location), a breakout performance by Lawrence, with solid support from the other leads, and a great premise. Early on the tension is palpable, helped greatly by the understated, almost documentary-style camera-work, as young Ree embarks on her quest.

This promising start is gradually squandered though by a meandering, sometimes repetitive script, and amateur actors plucked from the local area. They repeatedly break the spell - when they are supposed to be menacing they look like they are barely suppressing an attack of the giggles. Later on, as the pace starts to build, events start to become faintly ridiculous, building to a truly gratuitous finale.

I wanted to enjoy it more because much here is very good - Granik and Lawrence are surely destined for great things - but as a story it fell a little flat for me.

Brothers (I) (2009)

Earnest but perhaps trying a little too hard

[6/10 · 18 December 2009]

Just OK. Very well acted particularly by Gyllenhaal, Portman, and the two young 'uns, and a compelling tale of how war can mess up a family, but a little too melodramatic to hold much power for me.

There's also the misjudged Afghan side story, which is populated by cartoon characters. It might have worked better had we been kept completely in the dark as to the soldier's fate, to be put in the same position as the wife and brother. As it is we are simply sitting waiting for his inevitable (rather than hoped-for) return and we know any emotional investment during this buildup will be wasted. It feels almost tacked on - did they need to give Maguire more to do? He's the best I've ever seen him btw, but I didn't find him as convincing as the other two leads who had a more nuanced story to work with.

The Lovely Bones (2009)

Forget the book, this film is a disaster on its own terms

[4/10 · 11 December 2009]

Pretty to look at, beautiful at times even, but with all his distractions Jackson has somehow managed to take brutal and disturbing subject matter and leave me feeling nothing apart from vague amusement and disbelief that he actually went there.

I haven't read the book, and even I could tell he completely missed the point. This story, which seems like it should be about the slow disintegration of a family following an unimaginable tragedy, has been turned into a campy whodunnit where you know who dun it from the start.

Rather than concentrate on the relationships between the characters, he fails to connect the dots, jumping perspectives often enough to break any of those connections. It comes across as a set of disjointed episodes with overdone cgi in between rather than a coherent story. The jumps are so jarring at times (Oh look, mom is moving out. Oh look, she's come back again) I have to wonder if some of this is down to the editing and there was far more here in earlier cuts.

There's one particularly tone-deaf sequence where the grandmother (Susan Sarandon, clearly enjoying herself) swoops in and tries to "cheer everyone up". Fair enough there are people who would do that in this sort of situation, but it is so so overdone - overflowing the washer, setting the kitchen ablaze, all to a bouncy rock soundtrack - that I couldn't help thinking of Mrs Doubtfire. Completely off-color for something like this. I was struggling already but kind of gave up at this point, even if I did want to see how far he would go - and the ending is a doozy! After the luminous first half-hour, where I thought there was potential for a serious shattered innocence angle, it's a long sequence of "wait... really?" moments.

The actors try hard, including Wahlberg who I have trouble taking seriously after "The Happening", and I'm pretty sure THEY understood the real story here, but Jackson gives them very little to work with. Actors often say they don't like to watch their own work, because it's almost always disappointing to see a different story than the one you thought you were telling, and they would be well-advised to stay away from this one because Jackson not only changes the story - he barely tells a story at all.