Directors Andrew J. Smith, Alex Smith
Winter in the Blood is a hauntingly beautiful film that is true to the lyrical and unflinching spirit of James Welch's classic 1974 novel of Native American life. Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer, the Twilight trilogy) wakes in a ditch on the hardscrabble plains of Montana. He stumbles home to his ranch on the reservation only to learn that his wife, Agnes (Julia Jones), has left him. Worse, she's stolen his beloved rifle. Virgil sets out to find her, beginning an odyssey of inebriated intrigues with a mysterious "Airplane Man" (David Morse, The Green Mile), a beautiful barmaid, and two dangerous Men in Suits. His quixotic, modern-day vision quest moves Virgil ever closer to oblivion, until he discovers a long-hidden truth about his identity. But is it too late? Shot in the badlands of Montana, directors Alex and Andrew Smith (The Slaughter Rule) have crafted a gorgeous heartbreaker of a movie, a revisionist Western where the Indians are the Cowboys, set to a high lonesome soundtrack by Heartless Bastards that includes new
songs by Robert Plant, Black Prairie, and Cass McCombs.
WINTER IN THE BLOOD
Opens on Wednesday
Directed by Alex Smith
and Andrew Smith
1 hour 38 minutes; not rated
Like its broken antihero, an alcoholic Blackfoot Indian named Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer), “Winter in the Blood” lacks energy and volition. What it doesn’t lack is compassion, either for the wounds of childhood or the trap of ethnicity.
Filming in their home state, Montana, the brothers Alex Smith and Andrew Smith (adapting a 1974 novel by the Native American writer James Welch) sweat to translate Virgil’s existential pain into a visual narrative. Scenes dissolve and bleed into one another as he staggers between a small, arid town and the farmhouse he shares with his tart-tongued mother and his silent grandmother. Rarely without a flask or bottle at his lips (we first meet him passed out in a ditch), Virgil has a bloated, tipsy gait and a lost-boy look. He also has a runaway wife and a black hole where his identity should be.
Similar to the brothers’ previous feature, “The Slaughter Rule” *(2002), “Winter” buckles beneath male conflict and heavy-handed metaphors. But the cinematographer, Paula Huidobro, captures the Montana plains and infinite skyline in wide, lyrical sweeps, while gauzy cross-fades parallel the ebb and flow of Virgil’s memories and hallucinations. Real and surreal weave together, and an impeccably chosen soundtrack — by, among others, the Heartless Bastards and Robert Plant — reinforces a mood that veers from dreamy to violent with shocking suddenness.
The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.
*The Slaughter Rule is a 2002 independent film directed by Alex Smith and Andrew J. Smith and starring Ryan Gosling and David Morse. The film, set in contemporary Montana, explores the relationship between a small-town high school football player (Gosling), and his troubled coach (Morse). The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
*The Slaughter Rule is a 2002 independent film directed by Alex Smith and Andrew J. Smith and starring Ryan Gosling and David Morse. The film, set in contemporary Montana, explores the relationship between a small-town high school football player (Gosling), and his troubled coach (Morse). The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
Plot[edit]
A teenager at a personal crossroads finds himself questioning the things that have given his life meaning in this independent coming-of-age drama. Roy Chutney (Ryan Gosling) is a high school senior in the fictional Montana town of Blue Springs. Roy does not have an especially close relationship with his mother Evangelline (Kelly Lynch), and he has not seen his father in years. That does not prevent Roy from feeling emotionally devastated when he learns that his father has killed himself, and Roy's self-esteem takes a beating when he is cut from the high school football team shortly afterward. Roy whiles away his time by swilling beer with his best friend, Tracy Two Dogs (Eddie Spears), and falling into a romance with Skyla (Clea DuVall), a barmaid at a local tavern, but it seems that Roy's short time on the high school gridiron impressed Gideon Ferguson (David Morse), a local character who coaches an unsanctioned high school six man football team when he is not delivering newspapers or trying to score a gig singing country songs at nearby honky-tonks.
Gideon thinks that Roy has potential and asks him to join his team; encouraged by Gideon's belief in him, Roy agrees, and he persuades Tracy to tag along. While playing hardscrabble six-man football helps restore Roy's self-confidence, he finds it does not answer his questions about his future or his relationship with Skyla. When Gideon's overwhelming interest in Roy begins to lend credence to the rumors that Gideon is gay, Roy starts to wonder just why he was asked to join the team.
MOVIE REVIEW *
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEWS; On or Off the Field, Rough, Raw and Twangy
The high plains of Montana, the setting for ''The Slaughter Rule,'' remain one of the last American outposts of a genuine frontier spirit. The landscape's surreal beauty and the climate's punishing extremes ensure that only a certain kind of person -- seriously outdoorsy, proudly self-reliant and not dependent on urban comforts -- would want to live there. But to do so, the movie suggests, is to experience a purer, rawer state of being than is available elsewhere.
In such an environment, fighting becomes an intimate bonding ritual in which men demonstrate their mettle to one another and to the universe. Fighting being a heat-generating activity, it is also a way for men lost in the wide open spaces to bridge the physical distance between them and fend off the cold.
The film, which takes its title from an unofficial rule of local football (while also alluding to the mercy killing of wounded animals), is a bleak, lyrical meditation on the frontier spirit and American machismo and its torments. The story of an embattled relationship between a football coach (and part-time newspaper vendor) and his golden-boy protégé echoes movies as dissimilar as ''The Last Picture Show,'' ''Midnight Cowboy,'' ''McCabe and Mrs. Miller'' and ''Reflections in a Golden Eye.''
At the heart of ''The Slaughter Rule,'' which New Directors/New Films is showing tonight and Sunday night at the Museum of Modern Art, are riveting performances by David Morse as the coach, Gideon Ferguson, and Ryan Gosling as Roy Chutney, the high school quarterback he recruits for a regional six-man football team.
Mr. Morse, always a versatile character actor, has never had a role as juicy as Gideon, a charismatic, sexually repressed man's man who falls in love with Roy while vehemently denying any erotic attraction. His Gideon observes the world with a fierce, demonic glare and the insinuating half-smile of a bully psyching out his victim's emotional soft spots.
Mr. Gosling, who displayed a scary magnetism as a Jewish neo-Nazi in the recent Showtime movie ''The Believer,'' communicates a younger, more tender variation of his mentor's killer instinct. Major star material, Mr. Gosling has a rawness and an intensity that recall the young Matt Dillon, although he is a very different physical type. (He's towheaded with a piercing blue-eyed squint.) The scenes between Mr. Morse and Mr. Gosling, especially one in which Gideon grabs Roy in a bear hug and is unable to let go, crackle with a dangerous emotional electricity.
To the smaller role of Gideon's old friend Studebaker, a local country singer who lurches around in an alcoholic daze wearing a stocking cap and a miner's lamp, the New York performance artist David Cale brings a heart-tugging vulnerability. Tough, plaintive country music, beautifully chosen and performed and mostly of the vintage honky-tonk and swing variety, plays a large role in the movie. Of all the human activities, it is the only reliable balm, alcohol being a portal to violence.
''The Slaughter Rule'' is the first feature film by Andrew and Alex Smith, twin brothers who grew up in western Montana. As the movie ambles along, it finds its own eccentrically impressionistic style. Scenes and images (some of them blatantly symbolic) bleed together into what feels like a thick, messy scrapbook of live-action snapshots. The dialogue is rough and twangy and sometimes sounds too muddy to be intelligible.
The movie begins with the news of the death of Roy's father, who was struck by a train. Roy's divorced mother, Evangeline (Kelly Lynch), who seems to be a fairly hardy woman (until Roy discovers her sprawled naked and drunkenly insensate on her bed), believes it was a suicide. And the movie seems to support a view that in western Montana the unceasing battle with the elements is often a losing one, culminating in self-destruction.
The story focuses on Roy's initiation by Gideon as a football player and ferociously aggressive team leader and as a lover by an older barmaid, Skyla (Clea Duvall), with whom he has his first affair. At the same time he struggles to maintain his friendship with Tracy Two Dogs (Eddie Spears), a Blackfoot Indian with his own roster of troubles.
For all the violence that erupts, ''The Slaughter Rule'' doesn't have much dramatic momentum. This promising but confused first film is best viewed as a touching portrait of thwarted, volatile male passion in a world where you could almost say that geography is destiny.
THE SLAUGHTER RULE
Written and directed by Andrew and Alex Smith; director of photography, Eric Edwards; edited by Brent White; music by Jay Farrar; production designer, John Johnson; produced by Michael Robinson and Gregory O'Connor. Running time: 115 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 9 and Sunday night at 8:30 p.m. at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 31st New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the department of film and media of the Museum of Modern Art.
WITH: Ryan Gosling (Roy Chutney), David Morse (Gideon Ferguson), Clea Duvall (Skyla Sisco), David Cale (Studebaker), Eddie Spears (Tracy Two Dogs), Kelly Lynch (Evangeline Chutney) and Amy Adams (Doreen).
THE SLAUGHTER RULE
Written and directed by Andrew and Alex Smith; director of photography, Eric Edwards; edited by Brent White; music by Jay Farrar; production designer, John Johnson; produced by Michael Robinson and Gregory O'Connor. Running time: 115 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 9 and Sunday night at 8:30 p.m. at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 31st New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the department of film and media of the Museum of Modern Art.
WITH: Ryan Gosling (Roy Chutney), David Morse (Gideon Ferguson), Clea Duvall (Skyla Sisco), David Cale (Studebaker), Eddie Spears (Tracy Two Dogs), Kelly Lynch (Evangeline Chutney) and Amy Adams (Doreen).
References[edit]
- ^ a b "The Slaughter Rule (2002)". IMDB. Retrieved 2 June2017.
- ^ Fox, Pamela; Ching, Barbara (2008). Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press. p. 238. ISBN 9780472070534.
- ^ a b Wachter, Karl (April 2003). "Reviews: 'The Slaughter Rule'". CMJ New Music Monthly. p. 68.
- ^ Inbody, Kristen (December 29, 2016). "'Shot in Montana': Big Sky Cinema is scope of new book". USA Today. Retrieved May 2, 2017; Douglas, Patrick (March 18, 2016). "Does Great Falls have a Hollywood Boulevard?". Great Falls Tribune. Retrieved May 2, 2017.
- ^ Holden, Stephen (March 29, 2002). "On or Off the Field, Rough, Raw and Twangy". The New York Times. Retrieved May 7, 2017.
- ^ "The Slaughter Rule - Release Info". IMDB.
- ^ "The Slaughter Rule". Metacritic. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ "The Slaughter Rule". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ Holden, Stephen (January 5, 2003). "FILM FESTIVAL REVIEWS; On or Off the Field, Rough, Raw and Twangy". The New York Times. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ Dargis, Manhola. "'Slaughter Rule' tosses metaphors like passes". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ Leydon, Joe (February 4, 2002). "Review: 'The Slaughter Rule'". Variety. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ Baumgarten, Marjorie (March 8, 2002). "THE SLAUGHTER RULE". Austin Chronicle. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ Jones, J. R. (January 23, 2003). "The Slaughter Rule". Chicago Reader. Retrieved June 2, 2017.
- ^ "The Slaughter Rule - Awards". IMDB. Retrieved June 2,2017.
- ^ "The Slaughter Rule - Box Office". IMDB.
Contents
[hide]- 1Plot
- 2Production
- 3Release
- 4References
- 5External links
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