"Winter's Bone"

A per­func­tory peek at the pré­cis and ped­i­gree of Winter’s Bone might set off cer­tain alarms for more jaded cinephiles, along the lines of, “Yeah, yeah, won an award at Sundance, takes place and was shot in the Missouri Ozarks, lotta poor people, gran­ola movie for sure.” I have to admit, I myself saw one or two reviews/descriptions and went into my default cyn­ic­al mode, recall­ing, as I’m apt to do, Nabokov’s description/parody of gaunt nat­ur­al­ism with its immor­tal ima­gined dia­logue “He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.” Well, shame on me, I guess, because the second fea­ture from dir­ect­or Debra Granik (who cowrote the script with her pro­du­cing part­ner Anne Rossellini, adapt­ing a nov­el by  Daniel Woodrell) is a superb, genu­inely engross­ing work from stem to stern. It’s a richly detailed and dis­turb­ing por­trait of a decay­ing envir­on­ment and a fant­ast­ic, mov­ing char­ac­ter study that pro­ceeds with the delib­er­ate pace of a first-rate thrill­er. Actually, in a sense it is a first rate thrill­er, or sus­pense pic­ture, or mys­tery story, or what have you. As the film opens, teen Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) gets word that her absent dad, who’s got a court date com­ing up, put the house that Ree lives in with her zonked-out mom and two young­er sib­lings up for his bond, and that if he does­n’t show up for that court date, the house won’t be the fam­ily’s to live in any­more. Ree had been plan­ning to escape the misery of her existence—her sur­round­ings being strug­gling farms and make­shift crys­tal meth factor­ies, her dad being a some­time pro­pri­et­or of the lat­ter, which is whence his leg­al troubles stem—by up and join­ing the army, but she puts that plan on hold to try and track down her miss­ing dad and secure some­thing for her fam­ily’s con­tin­ued survival. 

Not only can Dee not count on the kind­ness of strangers, her own kin­folk can hardly be said to be gen­er­ous in that depart­ment her­self. Her wiry, inked, jangly-nerved uncle, known only as “Teardrop,” (John Hawkes, superb as ever) at first irrit­ably advises her to mind her own busi­ness, and throws a little cash her way. Everywhere she goes, she’s advised by people with few­er and few­er teeth, or so it seems, that she ought not be pok­ing around there. Do they know where her dad is? Is he, in fact, dead? Ree not only does­n’t take “no” for an answer, she’s a first-rate ama­teur detect­ive: taken to the place where someone’s try­ing to con­vince her that her dad was killed in a fire at mere days before, she takes one look at the weeds spring­ing from what should be parched ground and makes no bones about telling her guide that he’s full of shit. That kind of atti­tude is going to get this girl in some trouble, to be sure. 

It is in fact the way she seems to almost court trouble that makes this char­ac­ter a whole lot more than a rur­al plaster saint. Playing against her super-model good looks (which have been rhaps­od­ized about in not-unexpected corners), Jennifer Lawrence con­vinces with every step as she plays Ree as resource­ful (and boy, is she ever, the way she teaches her young­er sis­ter and broth­er to not just hunt but to skin and cook…ugh…squirrel), thor­oughly ballsy, and almost exas­per­at­ingly heed­less. (Viewers who know her only from her work on…wait for it…The Bill Engvall Show will be thor­oughly sur­prised. But I do won­der how many people who watch The Bill Engvall Show will even be aware that this film exists.)

As won­der­ful and unfor­get­table as the char­ac­ter and the per­form­ance are, it’s the film’s depic­tion of the region that’s truly scar­ring. Novelist Woodrell also wrote Woe To Live On, the Missouri-set CIvil War nov­el that formed the basis for Ang Lee’s superb Ride With The Devil, and his work is known to be both deeply felt and deeply researched. Granik fol­lows him onto his turf superbly. That eco­nom­ic depriva­tion is the root of all evil, the evil in this case being crys­tal meth man­u­fac­ture, is stated plainly but hardly over­sold here; and how this form of crime des­troys fam­il­ies, and wears away at tra­di­tions and ways of life is put across in var­ied detailed scenes that seethe with imme­di­acy and authen­ti­city rather than dry didacti­cism. It’s, how do you say, organ­ic, and that qual­ity is one of the things that makes this as far from being a “gran­ola film” as you can ima­gine. (It’s weird, I know, because gran­ola is often organ­ic itself. But you know…) The film opens in “selec­ted mar­kets,” as they say, tomor­row, and I’d say it’s well worth your time.