‘We Are What We Are’: Family secret eats away at a town where people go missing
October 11, 2013
Human consumption (as in flesh of, not spending habits) onscreen isn’t so disturbing when it’s a vampire or a werewolf gnawing on a fellow being as an hors d’oeuvre, but bring that in a little tighter to where man’s dining on man for sustenance and it becomes downright creepy. Even the understandable plight of the “Alive” survivors, who chomped on frozen stiffs to keep themselves going while stranded in the high Andes, educes a shudder, like lingering reports of ritual cannibalism among remote tribes in Borneo. But what if it were next door, not something perverse from a sick mind such as Jeffery Dahmer, but a long-standing family tradition executed in the name of God?
Meet the Parker family. They feel like lost cast members from “Little House on the Prairie,” yet live in the modern suburban remotes of upstate New York. Mom (Kassie DePaiva) handles everything culinary, from the ritualistic harvesting to the careful trimming and lengthy rendering process, that results in a savory stew. But right off the bat mom has a seizure in the middle of a flash storm, heaves up blood and is gone. Her grisly duties fall to daughters Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner), though after the death their father (Bill Sage) declares a period of abstinence that allows for the macabre outer sheen of the film to fade and the edgy backstory of how the Parkers came to their generations-old practice to come to the fore. The girls struggle to come of age (a time of sexual awakening for Iris) and dad goes through maniacal mood swings and Parkinson’s-like fits. Continue reading
Development of “Gravity” began shortly after “Children of Men” (in 2006) and took nearly six years to complete because of the need to invent technology to make the film possible and the degree of complexity and time required for some of the special effects, which are far beyond typical green-screen chicanery. For what’s onscreen and the $80 million budget spent, it looks like every minute and every penny was poured into every scene. The film is nothing short of a miracle in filmmaking and should be held as such. 
But like the hero of his 2005 boxing drama “Cinderella Man,” Howard has come off the ropes with “Rush.” To sit through the real-life Formula One speedway drama, one might think they were viewing the work of an emerging auteur just hitting his stride, that first big studio budget behind him. 
The film’s intrepid protagonist is so tagged Don Jon (a play on his first name, Jon, coupled with that of the notorious lover, Don Juan) by his boyz because he always scores, though in private his ideal sex partner is 10 minutes of Internet porn and a tissue. Even after landing a nine (on a 10 scale), it’s not atypical for Jon to slip out of bed as the conquest du jour snoozes and fire up the laptop for a quick porno-boosted topping off. 
It’s a broad net, probably broader than screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (the Brockton native who penned “Contraband”) intended, but the material in the hands of Denis Villeneuve (whose haunting 2010 exploration of arcane family roots in the Middle East, “Incendies,” garnered an Academy Award nomination) is narrow, focused and rife with tension. That’s the gift and bane of “Prisoners”: eternal, dark bleakness. Take either of David Fincher’s serial killer flicks, “Zodiac” or “Se7en,” and you’d have a good idea what Villeneuve is shooting for. 
The tall and rangy Mike (Tim Robbins) runs a New York-based support group like a big papa bear, stern, avuncular and always quick with an answer. He may be the warmest practitioner of tough love. Mike’s addiction, while a bit vague, is more substance based than sexual in nature, but he’s been clean for some time and seems to have a solid home life with his dutiful wife (a radiant Joely Richardson) who’s obviously been through the wars (probably not to the same degree as Anthony Weiner’s spouse, Huma Abedin, but still) and opted to stand by her man. Then there’s his trusted lieutenant, Adam (Mark Ruffalo), an international financier with a primo high-rise condo in Manhattan. He’s five years sober and, because sex is so easy to come by, goes to painful extremes to truncate alone time with the TV and Internet. The good news is that Adam has met the perfect woman in Phoebe (a very toned Gwyneth Paltrow), though he’s reticent to tell her about his bug (sex is permissible; just not compulsive sex). Adam’s also taken on a new charge who’s a discombobulated mess: Recently terminated from his post in a hospital for sexually harassing a co-worker, Neil (Josh Gad) rubs up against a woman in the subway and gets court mandated to the group. 
If there’s one thing painfully obvious (like, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” obvious), it’s that Luke and Kate are meant to be together, but thankfully Swanberg – one of the early adaptors of mumblecore filmmaking (the lo-fi indie film movement in which production values, most notably sound, play second fiddle to the visceral and ideological elements) along with the Duplass brothers (“Puffy Chair”) and Andrew Bujalski (“Funny Ha Ha”) – is after something a bit more nuanced and un-Hollywood. For inexplicable reasons Chris leaves Kate, which further enables Kate and Luke’s hop-infused brewmance. The pair, along with other vat rats from work, spend many a late night lighting up the dingy side of Chicago, while Jill, conveniently a teacher, sits at home toiling away on art projects for her special-needs students. 
But there would be times when a girl would not show up for class, and when I would ask why, I was told routinely it was because they had gone “on the run” and was likely using or worse. There were also times one would have a fit during our sessions and need to be restrained by the ready staff members in the room. It was violent and shocking to me. The girls were raw, sweet and tough, yet highly vulnerable. “Fragile fierceness” is what I called it. 
The rub comes during the staging of the trial. The Crown, for security reasons, wants a closed hearing due to sensitive “secret evidence” that could put the public safety at risk – or so that’s the line being toed by the attorney general, played by a slimmed-down James Broadbent as an avuncular and creepy puppet master. As the trial gears up, a nosy defense attorney (James Lowe) commits suicide by jumping from a tall building. His replacements don’t buy the unhappy-gay story circulating in the rumor mill and begin to poke around too, but they have other challenges to contend with. Martin (Eric Bana) and Claudia (Rebecca Hall) have been romantically involved. It wrecked his marriage, and if a trace of their involvement is evident they will be booted from the trial. To complicate matters even more, the two can’t communicate during the closed-session segment of the trial and only Claudia, as the special advocate with classified clearance, can look at the secret evidence. 
For What it's Worth 