Up to present, the theme of drug addiction based around the life of a woman with young children to look after seems to be Debra Granik's speciality. I wrote about her Winter's Bone here.
Down to the Bone is an amplification of Granik's 23-minute Snake Feed (1997), which had Corinne Stralke (who only plays a bit part and has a few behind-the-scenes roles in the feature) as Irene, an addict bringing up two kids and struggling to stay clean.
Down to the Bone stars Vera Farmiga as the (initially) married Irene, who also has two kids, and lives in upstate New York – where this was filmed – in the Catskill Mountains in Ulster County. It opens at the end of a snowy October in a dismal mall in a rundown area and moves to a supermarket checkout where the assitant Irene asks an unseen customer if she has an advantage card, and on her replying that she doesn't says 'I don't either'.
This sets the tone for the movie, which sees Irene through rehab and a relationship with supposed ex-addict nurse Bob (Hugh Dillon), but it's hard to stay clean when almost everyone around you is using. The use of the Thanksgiving turkey wishbone as talisman is a little corny, although the lingering images of the pet snake are powerful hints of sex and danger: often almost synonymous here.
This movie has a documenary feel to it, a little like some of Ken Loach's work although without the political agenda.
Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is about as far from removed from conventional Hollywood - with its overwhelming emphasis on rich Manhattanites or the swimming pools of LA - as you can get: it is set the backwoods of the Ozarks, Missouri, home of poor whites living in wooden shacks and making a living not by making moonshine as in the past but by cooking crystal meth. Here, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) heroically struggles to keep house for a young brother and sister in a shack where her mother is incapacitatedly mentally ill and where her father has gone missing.
She learns that her father has escaped bail and has put the house up as a bond, although the Dolly family imminently risk losing it if the father doesn't turn up very soon. So Ree has to search for him by asking the sometimes violently hostile families that make up the community which inspired Daniel Woodrell's novel on which this movie is based.
It is Ree's uncle Teardrop, a crank addict who unexpectedly helps his niece, who leads to Ree re-securing her home. And although Teardrop's admission toward the end that he can no longer play banjo says much for the traditional mountain culture that is in danger of disappearance, the very end suggests - via the symbols of the newborn chicks and Ree's younger sister actually getting a better sound out of the banjo than Teardrop - that there may still be hope.
Winter's Bone is Debra Granik's second movie: her first - Down to the Bone (2004) - concerns a married, working-class mother of two in upstate New York, who is secretly addicted to cocaine. A Guardian article on the female movie directors Granik, Nanette Burstein, and Sanaa Hamri is here.
Addendum: I've just discovered this article from Southern Spaces: 'Life in a Shatter Zone: Debra Granik's Film Winter's Bone'.
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