My thoughts on Blue Valentine, Another Year, and Winter's Bone

Now that the Oscar race is in full swing, Ray and I have been pushing ourselves to see every Best Picture nominee and as many of the acting performances as we can.

To that end, we saw Blue Valentine last weekend, Winter's Bone last night, and Another Year today. I'm sorry to report that neither one of us can give stellar recommendations to two out of the three movies and we really wanted to, given the caliber of actors in both movies.

We did enjoy Winter's Bone, which tells the story of a teenage girl in the Ozarks searching for her drug-cooking father, who has put their house up for bail bond money and subsequently disappears. Winter's Bone takes a hard look at life in the Ozarks and brings the desperate qualities of poverty to light. At first, the townspeople seem to be divided into good and bad, but as the movie progresses, the two extremes become blurred. Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding as Ree, the teenage girl living with her mentally and emotionally absent mother and her two younger siblings. Ree serves as teacher, nurse, and moral compass in her family. Her uncle (wonderfully portrayed by John Hawkes) is reluctant to get involved in the search for his brother (he is also a meth drug cooker), but ultimately decides to do the right thing and help his family. You can't help but root for Ree to find out what really happened to her dad while keeping her family intact.

Of the remaining two movies, I liked Blue Valentine better. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams made the best of a mundane, cliched script and rudimentary direction from Derek Cianfrance. Their gritty performances in a movie that explores the history and decline of a marriage were quite good. However, I don't understand how Ms. Williams scored a best actress nomination and Mr. Gosling was omitted from the best actor category considering that both of them have equal screen time. I could have done without the gratuitous, racy scenes which I don't feel added to the storyline.

Another Year has one of my all-time favorite actors, Jim Broadbent, on board in this movie which explores a year in the life of a family. Unfortunately, the movie strays from this premise rather quickly and fixes itself on exploring the life of a desperately lonely friend and colleague of the wife, played to exquisite perfection by Lesley Manville. I believe the Academy made a mistake in not nominating Ms. Manville for Best Supporting Actress. Her performance was the only bright light in this movie. Mr. Broadbent is under-utilized in the movie, but I blame that on the change of focus in the screenplay. Another Year had the capability to be a memorable movie, but it fell far short of its goal.

The only Best Picture nominee I haven't seen is True Grit, but I hope to remedy that soon.

Keep grabbing that popcorn and go to the movies!