I don't care what Punxsatawney Phil says. For the last several days, the greater DC area has witnessed temperatures ranging from 7 to 23 itty bitty degrees. That's cold as fuck (positing, of course, that "fuck" is cold, that is, and, in general it isn't, but that's beside the point). It's really fucking cold here. So what does every good little movie nerd do? Yep, I balled up under a blanket and settled in for the weekend.
So, firstly, I'm beginning to think Maggie Gyllenhaal is slightly unsung. I mean, her brother's caught fire... and he's good and all... but his sad-eyed yearning in the likes of Brokeback Mountain and Donnie Darko and even The Good Girl (all movies I've quite liked) really only puts him on equal level with Maggie. God knows Secretary was the first love story that's spoken to my heart in many many years. And here she comes in Sherrybaby. In general, this is an unremarkable movie about a messed-up addict of a woman who gets out of prison and really wants nothing more than to get her kid back. It's not all that interesting a story. But Gyllenhaal's acting is something else again. She's a miserable sexpot who does a lot of ruining of her own life but somehow still manages to scape together enough integrity to act in the best interest of her kid. It's like the anti-The-Heart-Is-Deceitful-Above-All-Things. And I don't know that it's all that great a movie, but her performance is both meek and fierce, and though the sad Gyllenhaal eyes peer through it, the character is fully-realized and transcendant.
And every once in a while, even I need a good ole' craggy, cranky, cowboy story. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a movie that I heard quite a bit about last summer and just couldn't make myself see in a theatre. It's Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut and he's ostensibly the star. But really, Barry Pepper's border patrol officer steals the show. This guy's a racist manhandler in his job and just plain apathetic in his personal life.. until he kills an illegal Mexican vaquero (the Melquiades Estrada character) and karma comes 'round to bite him in the ass. Pepper never quite softens, and I was never fully convinced he'd learned his lesson, but he has the last words in the film... and those are subtle and underplayed and adeptly punctuate a rigorous performance. Jones' movie is about the lengths some of us will go to validate an unlikely friendship, but Pepper's movie is about how there are rules and how we break those rules and how we pay. And I found Pepper's story the more engaging of the two. And despite the fact that I wanted this movie to make some commentary on immigration issues relevant to border communities (and I suppose it does, to some degree), I was far more taken with the give-and-take aspect of justice that pervades the film.
And so, neither of these two movies caught my imagination in the way that some that I write about do... but they are marked by some stellar acting. Make of them what you will.
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