Next up on our tour of movies nominated for Best Picture is “Winter’s Bone”, the darling of last year’s Sundance Festival that has became much more popular as a DVD than it was in the theaters, where it only grossed $6.4 million, almost a third of what the next lowest film, “127 Hours” grossed. But its crawl towards the spotlight has been a steady one, and the film is now the Indie star of this year’s Oscars, garnering three major nominations; Best Picture, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) and Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes).
The story itself is relatively simple. Seventeen year old Ree Dolly (Lawrence) is the de facto head of her dirt poor family in the backwoods of the Missouri Ozarks. Her mother has had an emotional breakdown and is in a near zombie state, and her father is awaiting trial for manufacturing methamphetamine, seemingly the only way to make money in this cauldron of abject poverty. This leaves Ree as the only caregiver to not only her invalid mother, but also her ten year old brother and six year old sister.
As if this wasn’t already enough of a burden for such a young girl, she receives an early visit from the sheriff (Garret Dillahunt, like Hawkes another recognizable face from “Deadwood”). It seems that her father, who was out on bail, has gone missing. If he does not show up for the trial, bail will be revoked, and the Dolly family will be put out, as the deadbeat father put the family farm down as collateral. Ree barely bats an eye as she immediately shows that she is made of sterner stuff than most. “I’ll find him”.
The Oscar nominated film “The Kids Are All Right” plays like a feature film version of one of those quirky comedy/dramas you see all of the time on HBO or Showtime. This makes perfect sense when you learn that director Lisa Cholodenko has directed episodes of “Six Feet Under”, “The L Word”, and “Hung”. It’s all about family dynamics in these cable shows, a theme that Cholodenko exports to the big screen. It’s just a pretty big switch on the makeup of the family; a lesbian couple and their two teenage children.
