Movie Review: Winter’s Bone

— Possibly the most jury-decorated and critically acclaimed movie to emerge so far this year, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, which kicked off last month’s Little Rock Film Festival (and took the festival’s Golden Rock prize for narrative film), is a tough, unstinting rural noir set in the Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri, not far from the Arkansas line.

Adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name, it’s marked by high-fidelity portrayals by actors expert and amateur, as well as an insistent sense of place. Granik’s camera is as unflinching as her heroine, a 17-year-old girl who has dropped out of high school to care for her younger brother and sister and catatonic mother.

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) plans to escape the squalor of her desperately poor home life by joining the Army, but her plans are derailed when her crystal methamphetamine-cooking father, Jessup, skips out on a court appearance. Jessup has put the famiy’s property - their house and timber woods - up for bond. If he doesn’t turn up soon, the property will be seized.

Like Mattie Ross, the young girl at the center of Charles Portis’ True Grit, Ree is forced to take on adult challenges - a journey imperiled by the code observed by her criminal kinfolk and associates of her father. In these hills, it’s dangerous to go around asking questions about a man who doesn’t want to be found. “That’s a good way,” one of her sullen kinfolk observes, “to get ate by hogs.”

After ignoring some not so subtle warnings, Ree is bloodied by a gaggle of tough mountain women and rescued from a backwoods star chamber where her execution is discussed by her murderous Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes). Teardrop knows more about what Jessup was into, and what might have happened to him, than is comfortable for him to know. And while he doesn’t want to know any more - knowing more might compel him to violent action - Jessup is his only brother.

As much an essay about an alternative America as a suspenseful rural procedural, Winter’s Bone breaks momentarily into gothic horror in its third act but never surrenders its hard-earned naturalism. Granik casts deeply interesting faces and, despite the disparity in the experience levels of the actors, there’s nary a false note struck. (An actual Army recruiter plays a wonderfully empathetic version of himself; the two kids who play Ree’s siblings are simply flawless.)

Hawkes makes a 180-degree turn from the genial characters he played in the HBO series Deadwood and Eastbound and Down, or the lonely shoe salesman he portrayed in Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005).

And Lawrence - who was impressive in two under-seen 2008 films, Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain and Lori Petty’s The Poker House - delivers what might be a breakthrough performance. For most of the film her face is a mask of resolve, a stubborn example of strength among all these weak willed adults. But when she breaks - she’s like a little girl.

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 07/16/2010

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