The Big Screen (78 page)

The people behind
Winter's Bone
were delighted with their success. Many who had worked on spec got a little money. The picture received four Oscar nominations: John Hawkes for Best Supporting Actor; Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress; Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini for Best Adapted Screenplay; and for Best Picture itself. Those nominations did not lead to a win, but they must have helped enlarge the audience for the movie. Still, at the age of forty-nine, Debra Granik has not yet announced a next project. That doesn't mean she lacks ideas or hopes, and her chances of fund-raising must be easier after
Winter's Bone
's impact. But it's evident already that her commitment to difficult material and the honesty in dealing with it will not be easily shaken. Which doesn't mean the temptations won't be there for something that might be called “Blood on the Bone.”

Yet I am even more impressed by Clio Barnard's film
The Arbor
, which opened in Britain in 2010. This is a tricky film to describe, but it is a study of the life, work, and aftermath of Andrea Dunbar who had a brief London career as a playwright before drinking herself to death in 1990. Dunbar came from Bradford, in the north of England, and from a street fancifully named the Arbor. The film includes actual footage of Dunbar, but the great body of it is a creative amalgam of sound interviews with her children and friends that are played out on-screen by actors who are “voicing” to the soundtrack rather in the way that in a musical the actors mime to the playback recording.

The layering takes getting used to, but its daring is to mingle Brechtian techniques with the raw emotion of the story that unfolds. In the
Guardian
in London, Peter Bradshaw said of it, “The effect is eerie and compelling: it merges the texture of fact and fiction. Her technique produces a hyper-real intensification of the pain in Dunbar's art and her life, and the tragic story of how this pain was replicated, almost genetically, in the life of her daughter Lorraine.”
The Arbor
has found a form that digs into the disconcerting way film is both fact and fiction. For me it surpasses the defined but confined story of
Winter's Bone
because its ambition is greater without any loss of emotion.

Clio Barnard was raised in Yorkshire and attended art school in Newcastle and Dundee before doing an advanced project at Britain's National Film School. She was helped to make
The Arbor
by Artangel and the UK Film Council, and her picture cost close to £600,00. Artangel is a foundation that helps many different forms of art, and its beneficiaries have included Atom Egoyan, director Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, and John Berger.
The Arbor
received good reviews in Britain but did disappointing business: about £60,000 from fifteen theaters. An executive at Artangel says that the numbers were of “no interest at all.” The foundation is out to recognize artists, and Clio Barnard was one of four go-ahead projects out of a thousand applicants.

When
The Arbor
came to America, in 2011, though it won a prize at the Tribeca Film Festival (Best New Documentary Filmmaker, which is hardly an adequate description) and had some positive reviews, it did wretched business: its gross was a little over $20,000 on very few engagements.

The project took about four years, during which time Barnard taught film studies at the University of Kent and had a leave of absence. She wants to make other films, and is hopeful of getting money from the Film Fund. But the competition is intense. Artangel has a policy (which Barnard admires) of supporting no more than one project from any one person. And the UK Film Council was closed in March 2011, with many of its functions being passed over to the British Film Institute. This is local politics, you may say, but it is the situation that so many filmmakers face all over the world, and it is the pressure that weighs on them to do something more “commercial”—if they knew what that was. It's hard enough to know what you want to do.

The most independent thing about any artistic venture is the wayward and lonely need that insists on doing it. Debra Granik and Clio Bernard may notice that they are a novelty in another way. In the age of Minnelli, from the 1940s through the '60s and into the silver '70s, it was so unusual to see a woman directing. They could edit, they could write scripts, they could be girl Fridays, and they could be beautiful. Some women worked cannily behind the scenes: Katharine Hepburn persuaded Louis B. Mayer to do
The Philadelphia Story
. Ida Lupino made a run of intriguing B pictures in the 1950s. In 1970 the actress Barbara Loden, then married to Elia Kazan, managed to make
Wanda
, on 16 mm, a fragile picture about a forlorn woman who tags along with a male criminal enterprise. It deserves to be a classic, but it took the risk of eliminating male romance—not just the way men might fall in love with women, but also the cultural climate in which men never question their own prowess and bravery. This cult is there in
The Godfather
(made in the age of alleged feminism), where the female characters have no larger function than having the male doors closed on their anxious faces or being the hero's sexual reward.

Barbara Loden died without making another film. Exceptional male careers have trailed away, too, when once the men might have been expected to work far longer. Brian De Palma, someone valued highly by Pauline Kael, has not in years matched the savage progression or cruel humor of
Scarface
. Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin, for various reasons, went into decline or withdrawal. Bob Fosse, Sam Peckinpah, and Hal Ashby died too young. Monte Hellman, Walter Hill, and Phil Kaufman made too few films. Paul Schrader, as well as being a bold and pioneering screenwriter (and a good critic), made
American Gigolo
(1980),
Mishima
(1985), and
Auto Focus
(2002), but has difficulty getting directing jobs now. Alan Rudolph has nearly retired—and retirement can be an honorable profession—leaving us to recall the wit and humor of
The Moderns
(1988, which is a better Paris dream than Woody Allen's recent
Midnight in Paris
). Michael Cimino was never the same again after
Heaven's Gate
, and is now a recluse who gathers more rumors than projects.

Coppola has not been his old self for decades, and George Lucas's comeback felt drained of creative need. Billy Wilder spent many final years in his office with half a dozen Oscars and a row of unproduced scripts that no one would green-light because he was deemed “too old.” He was bitter and funny, still, and he was about the age of Clint Eastwood now. But youthfulness by then had invaded the executive class, and sometimes those new men (and women) were hard-pressed to believe that anyone that old might understand their world and its movies, even if the new vice presidents kept posters for
Double Indemnity
and
Sunset Blvd
. on their walls in homage.

So there's all the more reason to respect the stamina of a few old men now (whether they like that label or not) who have soldiered on in difficult times. In 2011,
Midnight in Paris
proved the most commercially successful film Woody Allen had made and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay, which helped suggest that his core audience—urbane, urban, middle-aged liberals—had learned to live with their distaste when he photographed and then married the adopted daughter of his long-term companion, Mia Farrow. Or perhaps that constituency had just faded with the years.

“Woody” was seventy-six that year, and an institution as well as a chronic filmmaker: he seems uncomfortable without a project, and he has managed to find budgetary levels that work well enough, just as he has been locked into recycling his own anxious attitudes. (Despite his melancholy, he has ended up with a net worth around $40 million.) He is a film buff from the 1960s, yet he realizes how far that supportive audience has disappeared. Talking to
Sight & Sound
in 2011 about the “influence” of Preston Sturges and the Marx Brothers, he said:

The same old whimsical anhedonia inspires his comedies, though sometimes “inspires” is a generous word. We should be grateful for a comic turn of mind in an age that has made its comedies increasingly coarse and juvenile. Yet I'm not sure Allen exactly believes in comedy as a response to life, rather than a wisecracking routine for holding attention and deflecting greater depth. Actors seem to like working for him, but he gives them little direction or challenge. He makes films about social groups, but his eye is uninterested in space or arrangement—indeed, he tends to convert his scripts into films with scant joy or fascination in the process. (The contrast with Altman is most pointed in this respect.)

Allen had a striking arrival where he was more given to slapstick and catching the sexual and satirical voice of the early 1970s:
Bananas
(1971),
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask
(1972), and
Sleeper
(1973), culminating in
Annie Hall
(1977), the rare occasion where a player, Diane Keaton, brought unstrained charm to an Allen film. Then he made
Interiors
, a doomed imitation of Ingmar Bergman. Pauline Kael snapped that
Interiors
was “deep—on the surface.” Fair enough, but so were the comedies superficial, and Allen would surely have a wisecrack about the necessity of staying shallow if you're not going to drown. There are some original and arresting films, such as
Manhattan
(1979),
Stardust Memories
(1980),
Zelig
(1983),
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(1985), and
Radio Days
(1987, blessed by not having Woody as an actor), which may be his finest work. And then the list goes on, as if Allen has been growing older but hardly changing. It's an open question as to whether his pictures will last or seem more profound—something that has happened with some of the best American comics, from Buster Keaton to W. C. Fields. Those two seem to be broken but brave souls facing the abyss. Woody Allen only complains about that predicament, and declines to be a fictional person—he is there like his own brand image more than an actor or a character. He has never let us, or possibly himself, into his own heart, and when a man works so hard, that omission becomes disconcerting.