The literary adaptation Winter In The Blood is as confused as its drunken hero
Hallucinatory haziness gives way to symbolic opaqueness in Winter In The Blood, an adaptation of James Welch’s seminal Native American novel about a twentysomething named Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer), who stumbles about his Montana hometown—and the outlying plains—in an incessant drunken stupor, a look of belligerent or maudlin confusion on his cut-up face. Introduced waking up in a roadside ditch after yet another night of boozing and fighting, Virgil is distraught about the fact that his wife Agnes (Julia Jones) has left him, and also taken the beloved gun he received years earlier from his father, John First Raise (Richard Ray Whitman). Yet both his anger and sorrow truly stem from the fact that he’s a “half-blood”—his grandmother’s husband was, apparently, a white man—and as such, an outcast in both the Caucasian and Native American worlds in which he travels.
