Review: Winter's Bone

by Lucy Johns
July 10, 2010

Layer the brutality of the drug trade on the grinding poverty, endemic lawlessness, and pervasive violence of rural America and you get a vision of American culture foreign to most in an urban audience. "Winter's Bone" is unsparing in its depiction of life in the Ozark Mountains on the brink of heartbreak most of the time. Unsentimental in approach and aesthetics, Debra Granik’s film avoids the romanticization of life among the lower classes that Hollywood often exploits.

The opening scenes establish that a teenager takes brusque but loving care of two very young children. Hers? She gets them up from their mangy couches, feeds them in a wreck of a kitchen, tests them on spelling and addition as they walk to school, watches the youngest draw happily in class. The school shows what they can look forward to as adolescents: parenting and soldiering. Back at the weather-beaten homestead, a pickup arrives. The driver tells Ree - Jennifer Lawrence, not yet 20 when the film was made - that her father has used the home as collateral for bail. If he misses his court date, the family will be evicted within the week. Ree doesn't have much but she has no intention of losing the roof. She sets out to find her dad. She gets no help. She discovers the limits of family and friendship when people have so little. She evokes deception, threats, and violence. When the children return that first day, she teaches the boy, perhaps nine, and the girl, maybe five, how to shoot a double-barreled shotgun, how to skin and eviscerate a squirrel, how to cook venison stew. When the boy asks whether they will eat the squirrel’s entrails, Ree answers, “Not yet.” Her world provides no middle-class choices but she can still protect her charges from barbarism. She is 17.

The film makes no concessions in its depiction of the grim housing, the gritty lives, the hair- trigger tempers, the implacable outside forces that know little and care less about their effects on family life. Since Ree has no transportation – she had to give away her horse because of the price of hay - she walks a lot through trackless woods, repetitive action that slows the film’s momentum at times but that also signifies her resolve despite lack of resources. The filters darkening the landscape to implacable gray-blue underline the unforgiving bleakness of the world she inhabits and confronts. Tight shots and swift editing bring physical attacks close and frightening but never linger. Bodily harm is a way of life in this film, not a titillating technique for audience involvement.

"Winter's Bone" has another story to tell. The focus throughout is on the women of this benighted country, what they learn, know, live with, cope with (or not), how finally they are capable of helping each other if persuaded of the need. They don't persuade easily and they can be as implacable as their men. They know, though, when a task should not be done by a woman and they do their best to dissuade each other from risking their lives. "Don't you have a man to do this?" asks the matriarch at a remote cabin who knows Ree is wrong for the quest she's on. Dale Dickey plays this harridan with such skill one would think she was a local, as many of the characters seem to be. The production credits also feature more women in more varied roles than in the typical commercial film. Written, directed, and produced by women, “Winter’s Bone” projects a sensibility about American life at once respectful and realistic. Not until the very last scene is there a hint that there might be the occasional moment of surcease from sorrow.

This reviewer couldn't help, drenched in the limits of these lives, wondering: how will health insurance reform affect these people? Individual mandate? They will no more abide by this rule than most of the other conventions that prosperous America takes for granted. The only government that touches this culture is the sheriff (who is pretty careful) and the military recruiter (who knows that what he offers is way superior to what he's getting). “Winter’s Bone” reminds that barriers to the pursuit of happiness will persist, perhaps forever, even in the rich, smart, adventurous society America considers itself to be.

©Lucy Johns 2010