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Before Midnight: Very True Romance

Mary Pols — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:06:53 +0000

Director Richard Linklater’s first two Before movies represented the types of romantic scenarios you dream of when you’re young—meeting the right person at an unexpected-but-perfect time and falling in love (Before Sunrise, 1995) and then encountering them again nine years later (Before Sunset, 2004), only to find that everything you felt before was not just genuine but was still alive; a fire that somehow burned through nine years of nights, stoked only by memories. The third movie in Linklater’s series, the less joyous but even more incisive Before Midnight, exposes the underbelly of romance and not just the kind of idealized pairing that involves walks through the moonlight in Vienna and sunsets in Paris, but something more universal. It’s the counterpoint of reality to those earlier cinematic dreams. Picking up nearly a decade after the teasingly ambitious end of Sunset, Midnight takes on the resentments, both deep and unavoidable as well as petty and pointless, of a long relationship and focuses on the work of being together. We always knew Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) were capable of fighting because they were both full of such fierce convictions, but this is the film where flirtatious sparring turns into a verbal battle. Before Midnight is too frank and funny to ever be a drag, but it confronts head on something true believers in the earlier films has had to or will have to face, the possibility that even the most exciting love affair grows tired. (READ: Steve Snyder’s Q&A with Ethan Hawke) Each of these movies can stand alone and has—no one knew what the Before series could become, back in 1994 when Linklater grabbed a screenplay, a camera, the 23 year-old Delpy, French and not yet much known in America; and Hawke, a rising American star; and started shooting—but as a whole, they represent a powerful and unique portrait of contemporary love and life, this generation’s answer to Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series. In this era of sequels and stories broken into fragments to make more money (and not just trash like

Nebraska: Alexander Payne’s America, Plains and Simple

Richard Corliss — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:09:59 +0000

Europeans created America by landing on the East Coast and moving West, in the process confecting the nation’s near-Biblical legend of Manifest Destiny. (Sorry, Indians.) That hope (or illusion) nourished our indigenous art forms: the picaresque novel and its cinematic equivalent, the road movie. The directors of the Cannes Film Festival must also be smitten with the genre. Last year they invited three films about young people traveling toward some tantalizing other place: Moonrise Kingdom, Cosmopolis and the movie version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The same wanderlust is examined in a trio of American films here this year. The Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis focused on a young urban folk singer hoping to get a big gig in Chicago. In James Franco’s adaptation of the William Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying, the patriarch of a backwoods Mississippi brood insists that they haul his late wife’s corpse to another town for burial. This evening we get Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, the new film from the director of Election, Sideways and The Descendants. A minor work with some incidental pleasures, Nebraska plays a more comic but no less acerbic variation on Faulkner’s theme of obsessive fathers, family members bound and imprisoned by blood, and the millions of also-rans seduced by the American Dream. (READ: The Cannes reviews of Inside Llewyn Davis and As I Lay Dying) In Bob Nelson’s original screenplay, old Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), sinking into senility, is convinced that a million dollars awaits him in a magazine-subscription promotion, if only he can get from his Billings, Montana home to the sweepstakes company’s headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska. Driving him there, with a few nostalgic stops, is his dutiful son David (Will Forte), soon joined by his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk) and their mother Kate (June Squibb). On the way, father and son stop in their former hometown of Hawthorne, where Woody tells his old friends of his imminent good fortune. That cues a greed spree of locals eager to collect their share of the loot — a miniature, chimerical

TV Tonight: Does Someone Have to Go?

James Poniewozik — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:37:52 +0000

The premise for an awful reality show and the premise for an excellent reality show are one and the same. A strong reality premise—strand people on an island, race around the world—is what gets your attention. But what makes it mean-spirited or good-hearted, excruciating or delightful, sleazy or gratifying, is the execution. Protestors drove ABC’s Welcome to the Neighborhood off the air in 2005 before it ever debuted, because of the premise (seven couples, including minorities, competed to win a house and were judged by their future neighbors); later, after actually seeing all the episodes, gay-rights-advocacy group GLAAD endorsed it. Spike TV’s The Joe Schmo Show–which surrounded a “contestant” with actors–could have been a cruel joke; it turned out to be a pitch-perfect and good-natured parody. All of this is to say that, despite its premise, I went into Does Someone Have to Go?—Fox’s new reality show in which coworkers select some of their number for possible firing—assuming that it might not be as bad as you would think. As it turns out, Does Someone Have to Go? is exactly bad as you would think. Now admittedly, the title itself was a pretty good hint that this show was not going to take the high road when it came to conflict resolution in the workplace. The series visits a string of troubled workplaces, promising to “give employees a voice” in solving the office’s problems—by confronting one another, blaming one another for the dysfunction, and voting for three candidates for possible elimination. You could probably make a good reality show about visiting a workplace, identifying what and who isn’t working, and forcing some sort of crisis to make clear what the group needs to do better: that’s essentially what, say, Kitchen Nightmares or Restaurant: Impossible does in the food-service business. Those shows can be overdramatic or manipulated, but when they work—see, for instance, the absolutely bananas “Amy’s Baking Company” episode of Kitchen Nightmares–they can be revealing snapshots of how a bad workplace gets that way, and how individual neurosis becomes everyone’s

Joel Stein Talks with the Director and Stars of Before Midnight

Joel Stein — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:29:15 +0000

I sat down with director Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke to talk about their new movie, Before Midnight, which follows their two characters from Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). The three also co-wrote Midnight and Sunset. For a very thoughtful, touching essay on the film that ran in the magazine (and is accessible to subscribers), click here. TIME: In the first film, Before Sunrise, there’s a moment when they first kiss… JULIE DELPY: Tongue, tonsil, tongue, tonsil… RICHARD LINKLATER: That was my direction: tongue, tonsil, tongue, tonsil ETHAN HAWKE: It was one of my worst experiences on a film set. It’s sunset on that beautiful Ferris wheel and we’re supposed to be having this beatific experience. We do this kiss scene, and as soon as Rick goes “Cut,” Julie’s like, “Ewww! He kisses like an adolescent!” That’s a line in the movie. HAWKE: We work everything in, buddy. That’s a particularly painful thing to work in. HAWKE: It’s not interesting if it’s not painful. LINKLATER: Ethan is brave that way. At the beginning of Before Midnight, I made an audible gasp when we find out that Jesse and Celine are still together. After I saw the movie, I was like, “Of course they are; how would they make a movie otherwise?” But was there a discussion about it? HAWKE: I think the gasp is—it’s two films of wanting these people to be together and they’re not together. It’s weird that Before Sunset is this incredibly romantic film—people cite it as a romantic film—and we never kiss. Who makes a romance where the two characters never even kiss? LINKLATER: As soon as Before Sunset fades out, the audience gets to fill in. They can go to town with what happens next. That was a good place for us to stop. HAWKE: A good place for the third one to begin was with the ramifications. When you follow your passion, there are consequences. And the consequences are Hank, Jesse’s son—he’s the one who suffers from Jesse

Today’s Movie Trailers: We’re the Millers and Don Jon Show Some Skin

Lily Rothman — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:19:48 +0000

Ever imagine Jennifer Aniston playing a stripper? Or Jason Sudeikis and Ed Helms as drug dealers? Then this new trailer for the upcoming comedy We’re the Millers is for you: Sudeikis plays a pot merchant contracted by Helms to smuggle a shipment from Mexico; Aniston plays his neighbor, a stripper, whom he asks to pretend to be his wife while they pose as a family on vacation. Emma Roberts and relative newcomer Will Poulter play the teens they recruit to play their kids. We’re the Millers will be in theaters Aug. 9. (MORE: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is Going to Have His Own Variety Show) Another newly released trailer that keeps it racy is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s feature directing/writing debut, Don Jon (previously titled Don Jon’s Addiction). The movie, which sold at Sundance, stars Gordon-Levitt as a guy content to live a life focused on working out, going to church, having dinner with his family, keeping his apartment and car clean, picking up babes and watching porn—until he meets girl-with-a-secret Scarlett Johansson. Julianne Moore and Tony Danza also star. Don Jon is out Oct. 18.

Why Reality TV Is the New Family TV

James Poniewozik — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:12:30 +0000

Thirteen summers ago, when a pair of shows called Survivor and Big Brother debuted on CBS, there were uneasy cries that reality TV was coarsening our civilization. Contestants were encouraged to lie and backstab one another! People were eating actual rats! What was going to be next: snuff films? Thirteen years later, you can debate how well reality TV, overall, has fulfilled its promise as a hell-bound handbasket. But I do know this: when the regular TV season ended last week and the summer premiere season started, it was an exciting time at home, because it meant Masterchef was coming back, and we could watch it together with the Tuned In Jrs. Reality TV is a big, diverse medium, of course: some of it is raunchy, some of it ugly, some obnoxious (like tonight’s despicable let’s-fire-someone-fest Does Someone Have to Go? on Fox), and some of it very, very good. In other words, it’s not unlike scripted TV. But another funny thing has happened over the past generation: reality TV has also become the new version, and maybe the last bastion, of primetime family viewing. It’s not just Masterchef: nearly every TV series my wife and I watch with the Tuned In Jrs. is a reality show. We handicap The Voice contestants’ odds every week. The Amazing Race has given us a whole new perspective on airport travel. Shark Tank captivates the kids, and has shown me—one of the least entrepreneurial people I know—what a fascinating process valuing a business is. Top Chef, Chopped, Market Warriors—if it involves cooking or selling something, we’ll watch it. Other families I know, anecdotally, are into Storage Wars or Duck Dynasty (the latter, I guess, much like families in the ’60s were into The Beverly Hillbillies). Most of these are competition reality shows, which is no accident: like sports, reality shows like these are a genre of TV that can appeal to kids’ and adult interests without denying either one. Most of these series are made for adults, often without any particular goal of

The National Breathes Confidence on Trouble Will Find Me

Megan Ritt — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:00:22 +0000

This post is in partnership with Consequence of Sound, an online music publication devoted to the ever growing and always thriving worldwide music scene. Confidence. Comfort in one’s own skin. It’s the difference between trying too hard and coming off as a fraud or following your own heart and rising to the top. Many a band waffles after success, making, instead, what they think the audience wants to hear. But with Trouble Will Find Me, The National’s sixth full-length studio album outlines the confidence to expand and experiment with the formula, paired with the skills to do it justice. That confidence is present from the opening salvo, where The National sets the tone and pace for the record. This consistency is a particular skill of theirs; after all, where would Alligator begin outside of “Secret Meeting,” The Boxer without “Fake Empire,” or High Violet sans “Terrible Love”? At this point, it’s an established tenet for any National album to make a proper introduction before any listener is free to roam in its ensuing universe. (MORE: A Conversation with Daft Punk) “I Should Live In Salt,” then, establishes Trouble as a comparatively upbeat place. Over balmy chords and a touch of campfire tambourine, Matt Berninger pines for redemption as he intones, “I should live in salt for leaving you behind.” Lyrically, it’s another somber affair from the bearded singer, but what’s key to note is the mood that’s conveyed through its rousing instrumentation. The angelic harmonies and those sky-searching guitar lines keep the head up, rather than staring down towards the cracked earth in disappointment. With these sensibilities in play, The National embark on a meditative journey that doesn’t necessarily eschew a sunny day. But that’s not to say that the album is without its darker moments — we’re still talking about the National, after all. Shortly after, “Demons” haunts behind its uptempo synth backbeat, to which Berninger bemoans his own pessimism: “I wish that I could rise above it / But I stay down with my demons.” The usual lyrical themes of disappointing relationships, lowered expectations, and heartbreak are prevalent here, epitomized in the smooth

All Is Lost: Robert Redford Is Our Man

Mary Corliss — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:30:57 +0000

A man sails the Indian Ocean alone on his 37-foot yacht, 1700 nautical miles from the Sumatra Straits. He is awoken one morning by a crash: a metal container off a cargo ship has struck his boat, perforating and flooding it, disabling all communication. The man fights resourcefully to repair the damage and battle the elements: blistering sun, a violent storm. After eight debilitating days, with only a half-day’s worth of rations left and virtually no hope for rescue, it seems that all is lost. J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost strips the conventional action movie to its essentials. One confined setting. Virtually no dialogue. And a man with only the sailing skills and self-determination to make a go of survival. His boat is called the Virginia Jean, but he is the man with no name, no knowable past, no loved ones nor enemies back home to give his quest familiar emotional moorings. In a way, Chandor set himself and his audience the same restrictions as his protagonist. They would discover who the man is by what he can do. And by who plays him: Robert Redford. (READ: Mary Corliss on Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep) All Is Lost, which had its world premiere at Cannes before opening in U.S. theaters this October, stocks its 105 minutes with enough seafaring challenges and adventure to keep mainstream audiences fascinated, fraught and rooting for the person identified in the closing credits as “Our Man.” Yet it is also an arguably unique exercise in storytelling: both a work of cinematic innovation and a thrilling demonstration of the ancient maxim that action is character. Other films about a man alone on the water look positively profligate by comparison. Spencer Tracy played a Cuban fisherman in the 1958 The Old Man and the Sea, but he was on land with others at the beginning and the end. In 1963, Japanese director Kon Ichikawa retold the true story of a man who sailed from Osaka to San Francisco in Alone on the Pacific; there, flashbacks provided clues

Summer Music Festival Preview 2013

Melissa Locker — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:45:00 +0000

The Hangover Part III: The Third Time’s the Harm

Mary Pols — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:43:08 +0000

Todd Phillips’ deliberately offensive films have always courted controversy but The Hangover Part III marks a tonal shift for his successful franchise. The movie is so aggressively nasty and barely funny that it feels as though Phillips is trying to cull his own wolfpack down to only the most hardcore fans. The tagline on The Hangover Part III’s posters is “THE END” and there may be some wish fulfillment implied. The Hangover Part III gives off such a stench of creative decay that it hardly seems possible that even Phillips or his co-writers have any use for the movie themselves. If a movie can be self-loathing and self-destructive, it’s this one. Even the impetus behind the journey, which does include a trip back to Las Vegas, the scene of the wickedly fun original, is bleak. Instead of a rollicking bachelor party enhanced by drugs, there’s a funeral, followed by an intervention. Alan (Zack Galifianakis) has been off his meds for six months when the movie begins. He is enticed to enter a treatment facility in Arizona by a promise that Phil (Bradley Cooper) and the rest of the Wolfpack, Stu (Ed Helms) and the guy who always gets left behind, Alan’s brother-in-law Doug (Justin Bartha), will drive him there. Of course, the trip to Arizona is derailed—and the purpose of it completely forgotten—by an encounter with a drug lord-type named Marshall (John Goodman) and his henchmen, including “Black Doug” from the first film. Marshall demands the guys find and bring him Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), who double-crossed him around the time of the first Hangover. (READ: Proof that our reviewer actually took some pleasure in The Hangover franchise in the past) Alan’s specific mental-health issue has remained vague throughout the series but whatever it is, it leads to some spectacularly dunderheaded and mean behavior. In his first scene in The Hangover Part III, Alan drives down the freeway pulling a wagon with a giraffe upright in it. It’s his new pet. The giraffe is obviously almost entirely computer-generated but still looks smart, soulful, friendly. It is

From Chinese Dissident Artist Ai Weiwei: A Profanity-Laced Heavy-Metal Music Video

Yue Wang — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:28:50 +0000

Ai Weiwei’s creativity is spinning at full throttle. The 56-year-old Chinese rebel artist has released his first heavy-metal single “Dumbass,” a song that is based on his 81-day secret detention in 2011. Ai was arrested two years ago during a crackdown on dissident bloggers, lawyers and campaigners. His arrest sparked an international outcry. Though he was released in June of that year, without being charged with any actual crimes, Chinese authorities would later claim he evaded paying taxes and slam him with a $2.4 million fine. (MORE: The Artist Who Can’t Leave China: An Interview with Ai Weiwei) He said in a statement that the accompanying music video is a detailed reconstruction of his prison condition, which he committed to memory because he “had nothing else to do.” (Prison guards would secretly ask him to sing for them as a way to kill time.) In the video, Ai tries to show the contrast between the realities of prison and the fantasies of his guards, while reflecting on the struggle to establish basic human rights in China. (MORE: Chinese Activist Ai Weiwei Loses Appeal on Tax Charge) “Dumbass,” already blocked in the Chinese mainland, is the top song of his six-track debut album Divina Commedia, which is set to be released next month. The song’s music was handled by Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a rock musician and contemporary artist. According to the New York Times, Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle shot the video. Doyle, a Hong Kong resident, has worked with director Wong Kar-wai and Zhang Yimou, China’s star filmmaker that directed the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics. (MORE: Ai Weiwei: Artist, Dissident, Rock Musician? ) “I stand up as a dumbass, the whole country acts like a prostitute,” he belts out the lyrics (a very muted translation of the actual Chinese expletive), “Dumbasses are everywhere, forget about forgiveness and tolerance.” The artist, whose passport is still held by Chinese authorities, currently lives in Beijing. He is working on his second album, which he told Reuters would be a collection of more romantic tunes.

Only God Forgives: A Red Light for Ryan Gosling

Richard Corliss — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:15:59 +0000

Ryan Gosling sent a note of apology for his absence on the Cannes red carpet for his role in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives. “I can’t believe that I’m not in Cannes with you,” Gosling wrote. “I was hoping to be coming but I am in the third week of shooting my movie [his directorial debut with How to Catch a Monster]. I miss you all. Nicolas, my friend, we really are the same, simply in different worlds and I am sending you good vibrations. I am with you all.” Emailing from Detroit, Gosling put more emotion and craft into that note than he displays in his reunion with the Danish auteur of Drive, which won the Best Director prize when it premiered at Cannes two years ago. Here the star plays Julian, an American hoodlum holed up in Bangkok, where he runs a kickboxing arena as a front for the international drug-smuggling syndicate run by his venomish mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas). When his horrible brother Billy (Tom Burke) is murdered for raping and killing a young prostitute, Crystal flies in from the States to wreak the vengeance Julian won’t. On their trail is a Thai detective, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), who, went not singing sentimental karaoke at the local night spots, behaves like an Old Testament God who’d rather decapitate a man than forgive him. (READ: Jessica Winter’s review of Drive) Only God Forgives works overtime to be that species of art film known as the Authentic Weirdie. English is the main language spoken here, but the movie’s opening title is in Thai. The picture boasts glamorous moping from Gosling and a bold, deadpan-comic crazy-mama performance from Scott Thomas. Cinematographer Larry Smith, who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, paints with a studiously garish palette; the film could be called The Red and the Black. Black is for the sins committed after dark, and red is a vision of Hell imagined as a literally bleeding heart. Or maybe another internal organ. At the press conference, Winding Refn said

Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz Talks About Getting the Bluths Back Together

James Poniewozik — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:09:24 +0000

On Sunday, May 26, Netflix will debut 15 new episodes of Arrested Development. I visited the set last fall, and my feature on the revival ran in the print TIME magazine a couple weeks ago. This week, I’m excerpting some interviews I did for the piece. Mitch Hurwitz, the show’s creator, writer, and all-around mad genius, discussed the revival with me on the phone a few weeks ago, while in post-production on the new season: So, are you editing episodes at this stage? Hurwitz: Yeah. The episodes have to be essentially locked in like 12 days and I still have like three hours of content which is like three movies. So it’s this crazy pace – it’s been kind of around the clock. But I’m getting there. I’m getting there. That actually brings up a question: are you locked into, you know, whatever – 22, 25, 30 minutes an episode? They can be different lengths, right? Exactly, and that’s been a big relief. The old show had to be something like 20 minutes and 45 seconds – something like that. It’s a crazy short amount of time so it really honed my skills at the concentration process. You just – distill and distill and distill the material, and I’d look at those old shows and think, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe we did that in 20 minutes.” Now the new show basically I’m looking at it as a whole and it’s probably gonna be about eight-and-a-half hours which is, I think, longer than the first season was altogether. One of the many things that was so great and distinctive about the old episodes was that you really crammed a lot in them; I imagine part of that was sort of a side benefit of the running time that commercials forced on you. And yet I imagine you want to retain that familiar piece and metabolism for the show. Yeah, my goal was actually to get the episodes as short as possible, and I just couldn’t do it. There was

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories is Sleek, Bold

Dan Pfleegor — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:35:33 +0000

This post is in partnership with Consequence of Sound, an online music publication devoted to the ever growing and always thriving worldwide music scene. Random Access Memories has been echoing in the metallic domes of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo for half a decade. The sheer number of collaborations on RAM, including noted movie composers Paul Williams and Giorgio Moroder, finds Daft Punk building upon their new-flesh narrative, adding to their storied, cinematic mythos of the diminishing boundary between computers and people. What sort of film is this? Bangalter has shared that the group is “[D]rawing a parallel between the brain and the hard drive – the random way that memories are stored.” This tale of robots yearning to live like men is a motif soldered throughout the group’s multimedia career. But with Random Access Memories, the robots have found their souls. All it took was razing the digital foundations that brought the group to fame in the first place. Within seconds, the record stands out as a more homogenized and sleek listening experience than its predecessor, 2005′s scattershot Human After All. Yet it’s also marked by a playful whimsy that falls short of measuring up to the variety that pulsed through 2001′s Discovery, or the groundbreaking dance exploration found within their fabled 1997 debut, Homework. Instead, Daft Punk cuts ties with itself on RAM by exploring the past through some of the best and boldest collaborative efforts in recent memory. (MORE: A Conversation with Daft Punk) It’s a rolodex of celebrated artists, both contemporary and preceding, who have inspired Bangalter and Homem-Christo to make music that revisits ’70s discotheques and ’80s funkadelic boat parties. Opener “Give Life Back to Music” features a grinning Nile Rogers and Paul Jackson Jr. throwing down a jazzy fusion of guitar licks over an upbeat, funky processional that could serve as an album summary or even a warning: “Abandon hope of an EDM record all ye who enter here.” “Giorgio by Moroder” is framed around iconic Italian producer, songwriter, and composer Giorgio Moroder, who shares an autobiographical monologue that starts in the ’60s and works its way to today. Granted, it’s an honorable

As I Lay Dying: James Franco Does William Faulkner

Mary Corliss — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:40:13 +0000

A Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Yale University recently wrote a review of the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “The critics who’ve ravaged the film for not being loyal to the book are hypocrites,” he wrote. “These people make their living doing readings and critiques of texts in order to generate theories of varying levels of competency. Luhrmann’s film is his reading and adaptation of a text – his critique, if you will.” (READ: Richard Corliss on The Great Gatsby) That graduate student, James Franco, has also been a film actor of some note. Now he is the star and director of a film based on another famous novel written in the 1920s, William Faulkner‘s As I Lay Dying. Franco’s comments on movie critics nitpicking a Gatsby might have been a preemptive strike against reviews of his new picture, which has received its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section. And the movie, whose script he adapted with his Yale classmate Matt Rager, could be an elaborate summer project: attempting to find a cinematic language for Faulkner’s text — Franco’s critique, if you will. The effort is honorable, a mixture of mannerism and earned emotion. (READ: Is James Franco the 21st Century’s First Great Public Intellectual?) “My father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” The speaker is Addie Bundren (Beth Grant), matriarch of a clan of Mississippi misfortunates that comprises her husband Anse (Tim Blake Nelson), her four sons Cash (Jim Parrack), Jewel (Logan Marshall-Green), Darl (Franco) and Vardaman (Brady Permenter), the youngest, and her teenage daughter Dewey Dell (Ahna Reilly). As Addie lays dying, Cash saws away outside in the rain fashioning her coffin. Jewel tames a beloved horse, Darl goes into town on a fool’s errand and Vardaman returns home with a fish about as big as he is. Death for Addie might be a reprieve from the veil of tears that life in this rural