By: Ella Taylor
Published:
Friday, June 10, 2010
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127536626
Writer-director Debra Granik made her film debut in 2004 with a fact-based, verite-style feature about a young mother grappling with drug addiction in a dreary blue-collar backwater of upstate New York. Perhaps because it ran against the grain of inveterate American optimism, the grimly persuasive Down to the Bone didn’t last long in theaters. But it lit a fire under the career of its electrifying lead, a relative unknown named Vera Farmiga, who last year won an Academy Award nomination for her drily witty turn as George Clooney’s sometime lover in Up in the Air.