Wetherby, Part the First

I'm in love again...and I love, love, love it...

I am totally in love with a movie that I have not been able to see the end of yet. I tried to watch it this weekend between recovering from the galloping crud and being tired with the time change. (of course, it's easy to be tired with the time change when you stayed up too late on Saturday night just...fooling around at home)

Wetherby appears to have been made in the 90s although if I weren't so lazy, I could go check on IMDB...and stars the wonderful and incomparable Vanessa Redgrave as a very gifted teacher in England (in a small town named Wetherby) who holds a dinner party. Her best friend attends (Judi Densch) and so does a young man whom she assumes has come with the friend. But, not so, and a few days later he returns, brings her pheasant he has just shot, and reveals to her that he merely introduced himself to the best friend outside the cottage before the dinner (yes, an English cottage...but not in that "English Cottage" sort of way) and joined the party. Everyone assumed someone else knew him. As she gasps laughingly in surprise that he has actually done this, the young man--Andrew Morgan--pulls a pistol from his pocket, places it in his mouth, and kills himself. Noisily. Messily. Redgrave's character tells the police that she feels the young man identified with her in terms of being alone.

Redgrave's daughter Joely Richardson plays Redgrave's character in flashbacks to her youth where she seems headed for a life of love and, if not marriage, at least companionship. A young woman Morgan had dated until she had had enough of his strangeness shows up on Redgrave's doorstep.

and that is where I managed to fall asleep...and wish I had not. I love the way in which the film explores themes of the interconnectedness of a successful public life and a life of private solitude. This is a film that lets adults actually put the pieces together rather than hammering the viewer in the head with an obvious plotline.

I'm going to finish it--and I will post again. I promise. Meanwhile, to quote Roger Ebert (granted, about Apocalypse Now) this is a movie.

People of Blog World: I HAVE RETURNED

I'm back. I have been off the blog for so long I had to RACK my brain to remember my password.

Have just recently seen a great film--Winter's Bone. The film is set in the Ozarks of SW Missouri--not terribly far from my family home--and follows Ree Dolly, a teenage girl who must find her father after he has apparently skipped bail--or lose their home which he had put up for collateral. She has two younger siblings who don't understand the crisis thier family faces, and she trains them for the practicalities of hunting their own food. Her mother is in depression that makes her mute; at one point, Ree begs her mother to help her know what to do. Her mother says nothing.

I loved this film because the characterization is perfect; I grew up in the Ozarks. I know these people. The voices and accents are right; the clothing and the faces are authentic. The poverty, the clannishness, the independence and fierce pride--all of them are right in a bleached color palette that emphasizes the "right to the bone" life of the descendents of the Scots-Irish settlers.

OMG, I loved it. THIS was a movie--not the "cute" nonsense that people decide to see, marching in lockstep on the weekends to the local cineplex, decisions based on what was on the station breaks of Dancing With the Stars. Ree Dolly illuminates human character. Film is an art form; true art changes us.

Do what it takes to see this film--if it's gone from the theaters, put it on your NetFlix list or ask BlockBuster when it's going to be available. Watch something that feeds your soul--not something that numbs it.