One of America’s greatest filmmakers, Debra Granik finds her stories on the margins of a wealthy society. Her potent debut feature, Down to the Bone (2004), gave Vera Farmiga a breakout role as a working-class mom fighting cocaine addiction in upstate New York, her rocky personal situation aggravated by the family’s nickeled-and-dimed existence. Granik’s sophomore effort, Winter’s Bone (2010), brought critical acclaim to TV actress Jennifer Lawrence for her flinty performance as an impoverished 17-year-old girl fending for herself and her younger siblings in the Ozarks. A sense of economic injustice colors both movies, yet their stories are small and intimate: years after seeing Down to the Bone, I can still recall the look on Farmiga’s face when her character, given a reality check by a drug counselor, understands that her two young sons know exactly what she’s doing when she locks herself in the bathroom.
“It feels good to be by ourselves again,” Tom says once they’re alone together in the house, and Will admits, “It was hard not knowing what you were doing.” As their new life takes shape, though, one realizes that Will and Tom’s isolation from the rest of the world was the key to their intimacy. Tom enjoys their new living arrangement, especially when she meets a boy her age (Isaiah Stone) who invites her to the local 4-H Club meetings, but Will shies away from people, and when he’s out on the farm harvesting pine trees, the roar of a helicopter overhead drops him to his knees in anguish. The conflict between father and daughter comes to a head when Tom arrives home late from a club meeting and suggests that she needs a cell phone so she can reach her dad. “We’ve always been able to communicate without all that,” Will argues. Tom suggests that they try to adapt, but Will resists: “We’re wearing their clothes, we’re in their house, we’re eating their food, we’re doing their work. We have adapted. The only place we can’t be seen is inside this house.”
Directed by Debra Granik. PG, 109 min.
