{"id":2543,"date":"2014-06-21T21:05:48","date_gmt":"2014-06-22T03:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=2543"},"modified":"2014-06-23T10:37:52","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T16:37:52","slug":"winter-in-the-blood-hi-line-on-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/06\/winter-in-the-blood-hi-line-on-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Winter in the Blood’ \u2014 and Hi-Line on the brain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Panel\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

After a screening of “Winter in the Blood” in Livingston on Saturday, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Alex Smith, center, and William “Gatz” Hjortsberg talked about books and movies, Hollywood and the Hi-Line.<\/p><\/div>\n

LIVINGSTON \u2014 On a gorgeous first day of summer, something like 120 people crowded into an auditorium for the Livingston premiere of \u201cWinter in the Blood,\u201d a movie rich in beauty and brutality.<\/p>\n

I doubt anyone in the audience regretted giving up a couple of hours to the Montana film and to the panel discussion that followed.<\/p>\n

Like the novel by the late James Welch, a Blackfeet and Gros Ventre author, the film is a bitter love song to the state from one of Montana\u2019s great writers. Directed by twin brothers Alex and Andrew Smith, natives of Missoula, it stays close to the source material and may be one of the most intensely Montanan movies ever made.<\/p>\n

And fittingly, the movie was yet another expression of an artistic sentiment derived from the Hi-Line, that collection of prairie towns strung out along Highway 2.<\/p>\n

The screening was the centerpiece of the How It Happens Festival, a two-day celebration of the arts organized by Montana Quarterly editor Scott McMillion. On Friday<\/a>, three of the stars were pianist-composer Phil Aaberg, painter Clyde Aspevig and Montana poet laureate Tami Haaland, natives, respectively, of the Hi-Line towns of Chester, Rudyard and Inverness.<\/p>\n

\u201cWinter in the Blood<\/a>\u201d plays out on the Fort Belknap Reservation and in neighboring Highway 2 towns.<\/p>\n

As Alex Smith said during the post-screening discussion, \u201cThis is like a Hi-Line-goes-south festival, which is really cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie premiered just about a year ago at the Los Angeles Film Festival and has since been shown in a handful of Montana cities. Alex Smith \u2014 his brother was scheduled to attend the Livingston festival but had to cancel \u2014 said he is making plans for a Billings premiere but doesn\u2019t have a date yet.<\/p>\n

I will admit that I couldn\u2019t wait to see this movie, but I was also worried that it couldn\u2019t possibly match the brilliance of the book. I felt the same way about \u201cA River Runs Through It,\u201d another Montana book that builds to a terrible tragedy and is narrated by a man who has lost his only brother.<\/p>\n

And in both cases I spent the first half of the movie trying not to, but finding flaws, sins of directorial \u00a0omission and lapses of style. But both times I eventually surrendered to the power of the movies as movies, and both films managed to convey the gut-shot impact of the books\u2019 final scenes.<\/p>\n

In \u201cA River Runs Through It,\u201d the filmmakers simply inserted, in a voiceover, author Norman Maclean\u2019s unforgettable words. In \u201cWinter in the Blood,\u201d Smith said, they were going to do something similar, using most of the bitter outburst that Welch put into the mouth of his unnamed narrator as he struggled to pull a calf out of a mud bog.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Instead, they pared it down and then down some more, lopping off nearly two pages of dialogue. The result is a beautifully evocative, mostly wordless portrayal of something that is not quite catharsis or redemption, but at least an acceptance of fate.<\/p>\n

Smith said he and his brother, who are sons of the author Annick Smith, who also read at the festival, grew up knowing James Welch as a family friend. He said they were haunted by \u201cWinter in the Blood\u201d for 40 years and felt compelled to make this movie.<\/p>\n

It was a brave act. It\u2019s hard to say how non-Montanans will react to this achingly\u00a0honest portrayal of Native American despair, alcoholism and violence. That final scene of near-redemption is transcendent, but first you have to watch the narrator stumble through 90 minutes of bruising, bloody drunkenness.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s wife, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, who plays a waitress named Malvina in the movie, said Native American audiences have been amazingly embracing, which has felt more important than any validation they received from Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Smith said Indian audiences are more likely to laugh than white audiences because they understand Welch\u2019s gallows humor and they sympathize with the \u201cif-you-don\u2019t-laugh-you-cry kind of place\u201d portrayed in the movie.<\/p>\n

Smith also talked about their decision to film the movie on the Hi-Line, rather than chasing the financial incentives of filming in Alberta, as the makers of other \u201cMontana\u201d movies have done.<\/p>\n

He said they were motivated by the idea that \u201cif we embraced Montana, Montana would embrace us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the benefits of filming in Montana, he said, was that it seemed everybody on the Hi-Line is a hoarder, since they don\u2019t know when the next recession will hit. As a result, nearly all the props they needed, from the 1950s and 1970s, were given to them by local people.<\/p>\n

And there were layers of history and echoes of different eras everywhere. The lead actor, Chaske Spencer, is a Lakota-Nez Perce Indian who was born in Poplar. The movie\u2019s climactic scene was filmed just five miles from where the Nez Perce leader Joseph surrendered after his people\u2019s epic, fighting retreat.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the find of stuff that happened every day,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAnd it wouldn\u2019t have happened up in Alberta.\u201d<\/p>\n

I should mention that the panel discussion also featured William \u201cGatz\u201d Hjortsberg, a Livingston novelist and screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for \u201cA River Runs Through It.\u201d<\/p>\n

His main contribution was to tell a long and wonderfully funny anecdote about Hollywood, that bottomless well of vanity and mendacity. No summation would do it justice. My advice to you: If you get a chance to hear Hjortsberg speak, take it.<\/p>\n

At the end of the discussion, Smith appealed to the audience to help spread the word.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis film is living and dying on word of mouth,\u201d he said, so if you see it and like it, tell your friends, send out a Tweet and put it on Facebook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LIVINGSTON \u2014 On a gorgeous first day of summer, something like 120 people crowded into an auditorium for the Livingston premiere of \u201cWinter in the Blood,\u201d a movie rich in beauty and brutality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[853,855,856,858,857,846,329,115,854,843,842,845,851,850],"class_list":["post-2543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-montana","tag-a-river-runs-through-it","tag-alex-smith","tag-andrew-smith","tag-clyde-aspevig","tag-dana-wheeler-nicholson","tag-david-quammen","tag-james-welch","tag-montana-quarterly","tag-norman-maclean","tag-phil-aaberg","tag-scott-mcmillion","tag-tami-haaland","tag-william-hjortsberg","tag-winter-in-the-blood","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}