Watch Down to the Bone For Free

Let's be realistic.

Brilliant and touching

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Down to the Bone has a really gritty, shot on video feel that makes you feel like a voyeur as you watch Farmiga attempt to cope with her drug addiction and motherhood. The movie makes you feel like you are going through somebody's garbage. Some might see this as a strength; it does feel very realistic. However, I never cared much about the characters or what they were trying to do. The comparison I would make is to the HBO series "The Corner", but that brought out more feelings in me than simple awkwardness. This movie is like peeking through somebody's window - and the window is always there, as a barrier keeping you from engaging with the characters. I also could have done without the shot of the snake killing the live mouse. They didn't have to do that; it was cruel and unnecessary.

I have been watching Vera Farmiga these years and consider her one of the best actresses soaring in a higher altitude. She seems to be able to grab any role's soul she played and so convincingly delivered. Her facial expressions are always more believable than most of the female actors. There's a rare haunted subtlety that only a few female actors got and that subtlety is what I appreciated most. But somehow such essence might also limit herself if she tried to play comedy roles. Playing characters under extremely stressful or tough situations are where her strength founded. That might also be the answer to why she's so outstanding when playing roles in drama, suspenseful thriller, tragedy; those soul searching, self-destruction, struggling characters that would shock you to the bone and whip your soul.This movie is just like that. Vera Farmiga is a dark force on the silver screen you have to recognize seriously, a rare find in the already out-of-control pests infested Hollywood.

This is a naturalistic look at the problems ordinary people have in kicking hard drugs. By "ordinary", I mean that these are people who aren't denizens of the underworld. Drugs are around, yes, and they do get used, sometimes habitually, but the characters have jobs and children and cars and generally live working class lives. They're not Al Pacino in "The Panic in Needle Park," scooting around in search of a score and accusing his friends of "using my wake-up hit!" By "naturalistic", I mean that the dialog and incidents in which they are embedded are slow in tempo and don't sound or look "scripted." Nobody gives anybody else a lecture on dope. Nobody says anything like, "Either you control it or it controls YOU." No dramatic scenes of anyone going cold turkey. No violence of any kind. Practically no score.At heart, it's Vera Farmiga's story. She's married to a guy who does occasional coke himself but is not sensitive. She has two little kids -- one of whom seems to be able to actually act. Farmiga enters one of those twelve-step programs to help her keep clean and forms a particular bond with one of the counselors. At her own initiation, the bond gets more intense, and she winds up taking a little honeymoon trip to the city with her. But in their motel room she playfully enters the room where he's taking a shower and finds him shooting heroin. "I just wanted it to be really good," he explains in a daze.The pair are arrested during a traffic stop and when hubby discovers what's been going on, he throws her out. She loses her job at the supermarket checkout counter because when she was high, she was fast and accurate, but now, sober, she's slowed down, careless, and sometimes irritating.Farmiga takes her kids and moves in with her ex-counselor, having no place else to go. He's supposed to be on methadone and maybe he is, but he's also doing some kind of anti-anxiety agent on top because he looks and acts high and takes short naps during the day. Finally she tells him to leave and he does. The end.Vera Farmiga is quite a good actress. She has an idiosyncratically plain face that could lend itself to a variety of roles -- a long nose, a twisted mouth, and eyes that always seem a bit stricken. Nice figure too. The ex-counselor (Hugh Dillon) doesn't get to display his chops that much, not being the central figure, but he's got the right combination of shambling concern for others and sub-rosa perfidy. They're both good, but then no one in the film gives a sour performance.The writing has some distinct touches. Farmiga visits a pet store and buys a corn snake (Elaphe gutatta) for her children. As the pet store manager says, it's a beautiful and well-tempered serpent, pale buff with burnt-orange blotches down its back. We get to see a lot of the snake in its glass terrarium. It's non-offensive -- silent, slow, maybe inquisitive. Beautiful. The last we see of it is when the kids drop a cute albino mouse into the terrarium. The two animals nose one another for a few second and then -- ZAP -- the snake snaps up the mouse in its jaws and covers it with coils. It's a constrictor and it smothers the mouse and eats it. This is known as an analogy. The beautiful well-tempered tame thing turns out to be the strangler of its innocent victim. This visual message is infinitely more effective than a dozen lectures on the danger of things that look and feel good for the moment but are ultimately lethal by their very nature.Nobody exactly understands how addiction works, let alone how to get rid of it most effectively. There is the opponent process theory that we manufacture our own dope when we need it and the dope glues itself to receptors especially built into our nervous system to get us temporarily high when we need to be. Artificial dope gloms onto the same receptors. If used often enough, the artificial dope prompts the body to produce more and more receptors, and it keeps the nervous system in a steady state. If you stop the surges of artificial dope, all those extra receptors start crying out, "Where the hell is our DOPE?" And of course there are cultural factors at work, but moving to an Eskimo community might not work either. I've known users who lived in small towns near Nome, Alaska. You can get it anywhere there is a market demand. Maybe a small town in rural Utah might work, but ordinary people can't afford to do that, and the simple facts are that a user has a very difficult hand to play, as this film demonstrates.

I just got through watching this movie. It was quite real. I would have like to seen a bit more emotion. I would have liked to see this movie go on for another hour. It's one of those movies where the director could afford to do that with the audience. Bob is eye candy and the spitting image of my ex. I would have like to see him continue to evolve in the movie, to see the depths he might reach, had the movie continued on. I would have loved to see how Irene handled life as a single mother, totally single and dealing with her addiction, as well as her husband who was a total enabler and addict himself. It was nice to see another part of New York. I give this movie 8 stars because it, for those 138 minutes, had me experiencing someone else's life and entranced me. Total sequel movie. Hopefully it is in the making-I want to know how her and her husband met, how she was introduced to drugs, how she handled her pregnancies, and what feelings she was experiencing that kept her in her vicious emotional and destructive addictive cycle. Total sequel material.