by CAP » Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:20 pm
It's a killer film Jim!
And the book (by Daniel Woodrell) is even better! I spent most of the Christmas break reading some of his other novels. None as good. Maybe he's just getting better. He's in his 50s I think. He's got two coming out this year. But I did find an interesting blog somewhere about the film with a student from that part of the world, attesting to the tastiness of squirrel when prepared in the proper manner, amongst other things... He was a guy called Loren, apparently at present a student in Nottingham (of all places). Yeah you can google it.
But Loren, who obviously knows the place well, found the central character, Ree's staunch morality (her resolute duties to nearest and dearest), implausible given her low-life hillbilly milieu. I thought about this a lot. Why wouldn't she just join the Marines and let others take over raising her half-brother and sister, and near-catatonic mother? After all, there is a solid precedent for slacking, all around her. Well, because that would be cutting herself off from kin and The Clan and that would be like leaving a church or emigrating for good. She would only land herself in deeper trouble. So she stays and fights, but also, she thinks she can win - well she is only 17. But she is smart.
In earlier books other characters leave to join the Marines, only to eventually return crippled physically or psychologically, to further burden the clan, degrade their circumstances.
I do wonder whether she would be quite as reckless as to confront the main clan-head gangster in public (at a cattle sale) but then again she's working to a pretty tight deadline. The women's networking thing would need more time. But these things are handled slightly differently in the book - more is explained, like the fact that her younger brother and sister have different fathers from her or each other. Her mother went through a flightly period, before losing her mind. On the other hand, the film makes the bleak countryside almost a character itself (and the continual report of rifle shots from the woods...) And the character of her uncle Teardrop is superbly realised, together with his flaky partner. That stuff is priceless.
For me the most poignant moment is right at the end, as they all sit on the front stoop, and Teardrop finally announces that he knows who did it (i.e. shot Ree's father, his younger brother) and makes a shuffling exit, off through the trees. And you just know he will go and kill the suspect, and in due course will be killed himself and that is the last Ree will ever see of him. It's partly this fatalistic acceptance of death and this absolute code of family honour that make some critics see the story in almost mythic or legendary terms. At one point in the film (I think) Teardrop actually says this stuff (their lore) goes way back, further than The Bible or any nation, it's just blood!
That line went right through me like an Intercity express.