Down to the Bone

'Down to the Bone' is a mirror depiction of the lower-to-middle class struggle to keep clean while trying to overcome the perils of poverty and raise a family. It is not your typical run-of-the-mill addiction story either, revealing the darker sides of the problem and focusing on the lives it so often can tear apart. Vera Farmiga was the shining star in this role as Irene, a mother of two trying to keep her cocaine addiction a secret and save a marriage on the rocks. At 'Sundance' Vera took home 'The Special Jury Prize' for her performance and Director Debra Granik won the 'Director's Award.' It's no wonder that Martin Scorsese went out of his way to get her for her upcoming role in "The Departed." She is and will be a great actress in Hollywood for years to come. I look forward to her success in the future.

I saw this because I enjoyed the intense experience of Debra Granik's more recent film, "Winter's Bone". This film, similarly titled "Down to the Bone", covers somewhat the same emotional range. It is a very bleak story, but not entirely the most accomplished one. The problem with attempting an unpredictable story of addiction is in following the predictable life of an addict. This film is neither complex enough or well executed enough to really give us a new way of seeing things. Better cinematography could have helped. Using very cheap digital equipment (though probably more high tech as of 2004), Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough take "Down to the Bone" in a more vérité-style direction. But the production values are low and poor even by normal documentary standards. This is a style that would only have great merit if this truly was a documentary, and not a dramatic film. The use of a soundtrack and other cinematic devices detracts from any possible grittiness that could have added to the feel.

The truth and power lies in the acting, as understated as it is here. It's refreshing to see human lives without a lot of exaggeration or demonstrative emoting. Vera Farmiga is the best thing going here, and I found her style compelling. The other performances are all good, and never feel any less than real. In the end, something about this film feels unfinished. Debra Granik has gone on to do a much better picture with "Winter's Bone". This is in interesting starting place, but it just isn't enough more than that.

This movie telegraphs its tone in the first minute -- as others have pointed out, it's not exactly breezy. But it is well worth making the commitment to watch.

Farmiga's performance has integrity and guts, especially when she's interacting with the kids, but all her interactions with the secondary characters have a compelling spark of reality to them. She uses her whole body to say a line, the way real people sometimes do, especially when under stress. As in her other works, she commands every scene she's in. It's nice to see her own an entire film.

I felt the same subversive sweetness under the surface that many classic, superbly observed films seem to share, along with an astringently dry humor and personality, while remaining almost unrelentingly bleak on the surface. I found the final ten seconds particularly satisfying.

Having been intrigued by Vera Farmiga's idiosyncratic turn as a confused police psychologist in Martin Scorsese's viscerally impressive "The Departed", I was curious to see her in this critically acclaimed low-budget 2005 indie. As it turns out, she gives a startling, soul-bearing performance as Irene, a working class wife and mother with a cocaine dependency problem. The primary difference between this film and more conventionally moralizing addiction movies is how her drug-taking habit has so casually permeated her life.

Written (with Richard Lieske) and directed by first-timer Debra Granik, the film provides a documentary-like feel for Irene's downtrodden existence in New York's blue-collar-dominated Ulster County as a supermarket cashier, who has been likely a stoner for most of her adult life. Cut off by her drug dealer for falling behind on her payments, she pilfers one of her children's birthday checks and realizes the depths she has plumbed. Checking herself into rehab, Irene looks like she is on the road to recovery, but she is hamstrung by an affair that starts with Bob, a male nurse recovered from his own addiction. Compounded by her firing from the market and a husband who continues to enable her, she finds herself in a vicious circle of entangled dependency and dwindling hope.

The movie gets choppy and unnecessarily elliptical at times, although it is not as desultory as one would expect from the set-up. Don't expect any bravura set pieces for Farmiga, who is in almost every scene. It is the utter sense of emotional desolation she conveys in the small moments that resonates. Even when she shows how much she cares for her two sons or has moments of hope about a brighter future, there is a lingering melancholy that haunts all her scenes. Though clearly overshadowed, Hugh Dillon is quite good as Bob, as is Clint Jordan as husband Steve. I was surprised to find out from the informative commentary track by Granik and Farmiga that many of the supporting players were local non-actors. The 2006 DVD also includes the primitive but still impressive 1997 twenty-minute short, "Snake Feed", upon which the film is based.

I caught this last night on PBS as the Independent movie in their usual Classic/Short/Independent lineup on Saturday nights knowing that Vera Farmiga was the lead and hoping that she'd turn in a raw, unaffected, moving performance. In the end, her performance was good but the movie and the material was not and nothing could save this film. The movie is about Irene (Farmiga), who is a cashier at a local supermarket, a Mother to 2 young boys, who has had a cocaine addiction since High School and wrestles with the need to get clean and change her life around.

Drab. Boring. Uninspiring. That would be 3 great words to describe this movie. Not much happens and while not much had to happen for it to be captivating or deemed a good film, the overall slow, monotonous way this film operates is enough to put anyone to sleep. It seems as if the movie starts at a certain tone, continues through that tone and ends in that same tone - no high points, no real low points, just one continuous tone that creates an overall dull movie.

I'd rate this movie a 3 out of 10. I get that the movie was going for realism but every movie should have at least one heart pounding moment where the audience cares about what is going to happen to one of the characters and this movie just didn't have that or really anything to raise the tone above drab.

Oh and a sidenote - the most annoying part of this move is the eldest of her two children. Someone needs to teach that actor to breathe out of his nose because every single scene he was in and there were many, all I could hear was him disgustingly breathing out of his mouth so loudly that I couldn't really concentrate on the dialogs or anything else but his sleep apnea like gasps of air. It was gross.