I Saw a Movie: Winter's Bone (2010)

Illustration from Vance County N.C. Population and Economy booklet, February, 1967

The Sundance Film Festival is fun and everything, but you never end up seeing the movies you should be seeing. So you end up seeing one of the better shows that played at the festival six months later and think, "You mean I could have seen THIS at Sundance instead of that crappy movie The Romantics?!?" And Winter's Bone is the kind of movie I want to see at a film festival - an adaptation of a less-than-well-known novel with a relatively unknown lead and an original concept.

Winter's Bone takes place in the Missouri Ozarks (the setting of many of Daniel Woodrell's stories) - the movie's central figure is an unassuming teen aged girl named Ree. She lives in the woods, where she looks after her mentally unwell mother and two younger siblings. Her father has evidently not been much of a presence in the home - engaged in a variety of unsavory activities (like cooking meth), he's often gone for long stretches. After a long absence, though, Ree learns that he has put the family house up as collateral on a bond and subsequently skipped bail. Faced with losing her home, Ree has no choice but to find her father by going from one shady shotgun shack to another, trudging through the cold woods and questioning a variety of hillbilly criminals. Winter's Bone is a re-contextualized noir film set in an unlikely setting that has a specific set of social codes, which the audience must suss out by reference - in a way, it's reminiscent of Brick, another movie classified as teenage noir.

Winter's Bone hangs on the performance of Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Ree, and I think she pulls it off admirably - the genre tropes underpinning the story can't maintain a viewer's interest alone, and the audience being able to get into Ree's head humanizes the movie a great deal. The supporting cast is excellent as well, featuring some solid character actors scuffed up to look like country folk - two Deadwood regulars, John Hawkes and Garret Dillahunt are naturals for this material, and Hawkes' turn as Ree's uncle Teardrop comes close to stealing the show. Cheryl Lee and the woman who played the daytime prostitute on My Name Is Earl also make solid contributions. The directing is good and only borders on the self-consciously arty for a brief B&W dream sequence, and the naturalistic dialogue didn't come across as stilted to me at all. Most of the dialogue is straight out of the novel, but locals brought in to play small roles get to do some improvisational stuff, including an excellent scene where Ree is questioned by an earnest, real-life Army recruiter.

I didn't notice it until after the fact, but Winter's Bone is, for the most part, surprisingly low-key emotionally. Ree's struggle is desperate enough that it should make the viewer ache with sympathy, but the tension is kept at a very low simmer. I think, though, that I prefer the low-key suspense and subtly grim atmosphere to the more emotionally-charged, histrionic route they could have gone with this material. Notwithstanding some genre window-dressing and emotional distance, Winter's Bone is worth seeing for its finely tuned performances and an engrossing setting.

"Dead Man's Will" by Iron & Wine