Some reservations

Set in 1976 on a Mi’kmaq reserve, writer-director Jeff Barnaby’s already acclaimed, Canadian Film Centre-produced feature debut is a sort of cinematic trickster. Barnaby, a talented young filmmaker of aboriginal descent, presents his audience with what is explicitly intended to be an unsentimental, unflinching vision of the horrors of life within the residential school system and First Nations reserves generally. Those with no first-hand experience of this woeful chapter in Canadian history are compelled to accept Barnaby’s vision as authoritative, and the brutality he employs as necessary and even noble. Yet Rhymes For Young Ghouls problematizes our response by adopting what increasingly feels like a chic cynicism for cynicism’s sake, replete with one-dimensional, grotesque villains and a lazily conceived plot that slides ever-deeper into pulpy, comic book terrain, the final act riddled with nonsensical twists that read above all as convenient ways to ramp up the sleaze and violence.

During the opening flashbacks, Aila (Kawennahere Devery Jacobs) loses her brother to a sad, stupid, booze-fueled accident, her mother to suicide, and her father Joseph (Glen Gould) to prison. As the present-tense story unfolds, Aila, now a tough teenager, has taken over her father’s drug dealing business, along with her apocalypse-obsessed Uncle Burner (Brandon Oakes). Through voice-over and montage, Aila functions as our tour guide through the inferno of the Red Crow reserve, detailing sundry abuses at the hands of the reservation agents, in-fighting between “red trash Indians,” internal politics, bad health, absence of opportunities and irresolvable debt. “Indians don’t understand money,” is one of her many cold, flat declarations. Prominent amidst her on-going sociological diagnosis is, of course, a rundown of substances indulged in, itemizing the variety of high-potency weed she sells to most everyone in the community. “This is what brings my people together,” she says, “the art of forgetfulness.” The story eventually shifts into a more active mode once the ill-humoured Joseph is released from prison, interfering with Aila’s business, prompting increased attention from the nefarious Agent Popper (Mark Antony Krupa), and leading to Aila’s detention and eventual elaborate, faeces-infested revenge against Popper and the residential school.

Barnaby proves himself a strong craftsman from the start, most especially in the steady rhythms of his editing and deft incorporation of a mostly blues-driven soundtrack, and in his use of composition, which transforms cluttered, junk-laden, overgrown living spaces into dark autumnal burrows of resignation and despair. Yet, rather uncharacteristically for a CFC production, Barnaby’s script seems wildly under-examined. The story at times feels like a hasty repurposing of the basic ingredients of Winter’s Bone, though the model for the film’s overall ugly-flamboyant tone is clearly Quentin Tarantino—not necessarily an ideal model when dealing with fraught history. (The mishmash of formal, episodic detours is also very Tarantino: Aila is a gifted illustrator, and there’s a handsome, vaguely relevant animated sequence intended to bring Aila’s notebooks to life, though its contemporary style feels much more the product of Barnaby’s imagination than Aila’s.) Barnaby is a filmmaker to watch, and, given its subject matter and irreverent approach, Rhymes For Young Ghouls is very much worth mulling over and will likely endure as something of a milestone, but its also reckless, its narrative sloppy and its aspirations toward representation dubious. 

              

Winter's Bone: Hiding in the backwoods

Somewhere in the Ozarks, though it could be any number of places cradled beyond the fringes of modern prosperity, we can no doubt find communities just like this, where men are either absent or to be found cooking up drugs, driving trucks, or just getting wasted and mean and violent, while tough women do the grunt work, finding something to eat, holding down the fort—perhaps literally—and just generally negotiating for their family’s survival. Sometimes music is played on fiddles and guitars, and when this happens it’s just about the only time we see men and women enjoying each other’s company in Winter’s Bone, though surely there are other unseen interactions, love-making at least, that would explain how these people keep going, how one generation follows another.

Debra Granik and her co-scenarist Anne Roselini’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel embraces both the harsh beauty of its setting and the utter bleakness of its portrait of life among these rural poor, their abandoned cars, muddy clothes, and burnt-down meth labs, their lack of work and surplus of weight. Unlike Ang Lee’s 1999 adaptation of Woodrell’s Ride With the Devil, it’s a fairly humourless movie, though I think its tone is imposed less by Granik’s striving for seriousness than by the needs of story and genre. This is a thriller driven by desperation. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is only 17, but she alone is responsible for raising her much younger siblings. Her mother’s incapacitated and her father who knows where, maybe dead. She needs to find out, because he’s apparently skipped bail and the family’s property could be taken away. Ree spends the movie going from one unfriendly door to another in search of someone, anyone, who can help, even her extended family, not necessarily an advisable resource in this place where blood ties can lead to bloody conflicts and certain households maintain a mafia-like grip on the meager local economy. “Never ask for what ought to be offered,” Ree instructs her little brother, which is another way of saying steer clear of anything that feels like less than straight-ahead generosity.

Yet, while there are definitely times in Winter’s Bone when the menace feels overcooked, generosity is not alien to this place or to this story. Though Ree gets threatened, beat-up, and abandoned, she also has a neighbour that lends her feed for her horse; a friend saddled with a small child and a dink for a husband who nonetheless gives her a ride when she needs it; an uncle’s girlfriend who gives her a joint to chill out after a terrifying encounter in the uncle’s kitchen; she meets one of her dad’s girlfriends, played by Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee, who tries to give her a useful lead on dad’s whereabouts (so that’s what would have become of Laura Palmer had she lived); she’s saved from possible death by that same very scary aforementioned uncle (John Hawkes, a near ghost of a man); she’s given some good advice from a US military recruiter who can see that she, like so many in her part of the country, is considering the army just for the money.

Ree’s already proven her resilience before the story even begins by caring her family and home and teaching the kids to fend for themselves, even to hunt and skin squirrels if occasion calls. “Do we eat those parts?” her little brother asks, looking at the squishy, steaming guts. “Not yet,” Ree answers flatly. Ree will prove her fortitude again and again, discovering inner resources she probably didn’t even know she had along the way, and Lawrence gives a tremendous performance, one that feels like pure adrenaline with no time to waste on ingratiating winks. But the story rewards Ree’s almost mythical testing of will, not with anything like a fantasy happy ending but with the simple reassurance that when things go from bad to worse, with a little bit of luck, someone will be there who gives a shit, and will extend any free hand they can.