Meet Debra Granik, the next ‘Curse of Sundance’

Blasted curse! Now I can't get up!

Saturday night, as the powdery stuff fell on the heads of thousands in Utah, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival came to an end with statues handed out to Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian Junger, for the documentary Restrepo, an intense and very close-up portrait of soldiers in Afghanistan, and to Debra Granik, for Winter’s Bone, a spare suspenseful tale of a girl (Jennifer Lawrence, from The Burning Plain, which nobody saw, and Jodie Foster’s upcoming The Beaver) coming of age in the Ozark mountains. I can almost hear the banjos. Just a pickin’ an’ a grinnin’. Aw shucks.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I know this may be confusing, but Winter’s Bone is not a sequel to Granik’s previous Sundance darling, Down to the Bone, which at the 2004 festival won her the Directing Award, and won her star, the then little-known Vera Farmiga, the Special Jury Prize for her performance. Down to the Bone was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, but it didn’t win, and Granik was spared the curse. I hope she’s had a good six years. Though perhaps the curse comes to those who win in any category at Sundance, because Granik’s film, also nominated at several other fests and for two Independent Spirit Awards, was bought by Laemmle/Zeller Films, which must have accidentally put it out with the trash. Released in a few theaters in late 2005, and despite its stellar reputation, Down to the Bone made just $30,000. But all was not lost. We’ll always have Vera.

Ouch. I get why it didn’t do any better. It wasn’t the curse at all. We’ve all seen movies like this. Bad flick, great performance, like everybody but Farmiga was in a different film. If it weren’t for her, if Granik’s muse had have been, say, Valerie Bertinelli, this thing wouldn’t have made thirty cents.

Let’s hope Winter’s Bone is a better film, and fares better in the marketplace (and frankly, how could it not?). It got off to a good start when Roadside Attractions snapped it up last night. Roadside was behind the recent, incendiary documentary, The Cove, as well as Super Size Me and Good Hair. They’ve got the soon to be released Demi Moore-Parker Posey indie, Happy Tears, (they play sisters and are great together), which also features excellent turns from Rip Torn and, playing his nursemaid-slash-crack whore, Ellen Barken, who is positively unhinged.

Loads of celebrities were in attendance at Saturday night’s ceremony, including David Strathairn. I wonder if at any point, perhaps late into the evening, after all the wine was gone and the waiters were clearing up, after the glow of the win had settled into the pale fear of the coming curse, Strathairn might have stopped by her table on his way home to say, oh I don’t know, maybe, “Good night, Debra Granik, Sundance 2010 winner, and good luck.”