MOVIE REVIEW: 'Winter's Bone' harshly realistic
WINTER’S BONE
A-
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Dale Dickey, Sheryl Lee, Lauren Sweetser, Tate Taylor
Director: Debra Granik
Theater: Kimball’s
Rated: R (for drug dealing, drug use and profanity)
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
“Winter’s Bone,” a Sundance winner about what happens when a primal need for justice crashes violently into abiding and intractable tradition, is a gothic film noir set in the cold and cheerless Ozark mountains. Though it is a decidedly American tale, at its heart beats an almost Greek odyssey.
The film also boasts one of the strongest, most authentic, most fully realized heroines I’ve ever encountered. Jennifer Lawrence is revelatory.
At 17, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is the head of her ramshackle house. Her father, who cooks meth when he’s not in jail, has abandoned the family, a wallop that has buried her mother in a debilitating emotional coma. Ree cares for her younger brother and sister, a task that grows doubly complicated when she discovers that they are on the verge of being evicted from their ancestral southwestern Missouri home unless she can produce her delinquent father.
To find him, Ree must inquire of her extended (and frankly terrifying) family, who proudly and defiantly live on the wrong side of the law. They trust no one, not even kin, and the young girl who keeps poking her nose where it doesn’t belong (meth seems to be the modern substitution for old-fashioned moonshine) is bound to get it cut off.
Adapted from the book of the same name by Daniel Woodrell, “Winter’s Bone,” directed by Debra Granik, is, like its setting, both desolate and picturesque, resembling the icy, bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Granik, with astonishing local knowledge, captures the backwoods world with sparse, bleak economy and utterly convincing, documentary-like detail. It is as if Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression photographs leapt forward 80 years in time and came to life. Granik captures the look and feel and smell and taste of this tiny region of the country, forgotten and passed over like so many rural communities.
Likewise, the actors inhabit their roles without offering a single false note. While some, like Ree’s uncle Teardrop (played with powerful menace and unexpected compassion by John Hawkes), are recognizable if not identifiable, most of the cast are veteran unknowns (and in some cases, local non-actors). Their faces are mirthless; they may be rogues or redeemers, depending on the day. Theirs is a world of ancient grudges and obstinate concepts of honor and fidelity (reflected most powerfully in the women, whose fierce loyalty to their men is both perverse and praiseworthy).
It would have been so easy for caricature to sweep pervasively down the call sheet, but Granik always manages to hold it at bay and find the humanity inside even the most damaged, vicious personalities.
It is an attribute shepherded by the film’s young lead, who refuses, even in the face of unbelievable cruelty, to stop searching for any scrap of human decency. Lawrence, who until now was a regular on the canceled TBS sitcom “The Bill Engvall Show,” turns in a scrupulous, stoically heroic performance. Her Ree is just a child forced to masquerade as an adult. She carries the film on her shoulders just as her character carries her family.
There is poignancy and pathos in “Winter’s Bone,” but never of the maudlin kind. Much of that success is owed squarely to Lawrence and her profoundly naturalistic performance.
“Winter’s Bone” is an Ozark folk lullaby to be sure, but it also takes on mythical elements of the Homeric odyssey, of the ancient journey through determination and despair leading to a conclusion of harrowing and ominous tension, pregnant with palpable dread.
This is not a story about breaking free, but about unrelenting tenacity, tribal initiation and personal discovery. It is the sort of original, independent work American cinema doesn’t produce enough of anymore, unshowy and authentic to its core.
