Winter's Bone

(2010)

Directed by

Debra Granik

Review by Zach Saltz

Posted - 7/17/10

Critics who have been proclaiming Winter’s Bone as the best thing to happen to Sundance-generation Indies since sliced bread (or in the case of Winter’s Bone, sliced squirrel) may need to reevaluate.  There’s no doubt that director Debra Granik’s feature is a bleak, unremitting, and austere portrait of backwoods America. Yes, the performance by the 17-year-old lead, Jennifer Lawrence, is a grand slam out of the (trailer) park.  But consistently compelling film material, this ain’t.

Lawrence plays Ree, a 17-year-old who cares for her two younger siblings and invalid mother.  They live in a shanty heated by only a fireplace.  The screenplay gives almost no time to establish the characters before launching into the main dramatic arc of the film – Ree’s Odyssean search for her druggie father, who is nowhere to be found and has placed their house as collateral for bail money.  If he does not show up for his court date, the house will be taken away, and Ree and her family will end up on the street.

This plot point is contrived for a number of reasons (no one bothered to first see the house?  No local authorities are aware of the fact that the head of the house is a 17-year-old girl?) but never mind that.  The film quickly moves into its second act, where Ree asks her neighbors and relatives for her father’s latest whereabouts.  The film enters “Colorful Backwood Caricature” mode here, and the supporting cast looks like casting call rejects for Hilary Swank’s family in Million Dollar Baby.  But the worse part is the fact that Granik never takes the time to establish who these frequently toothless people are, and what their relationship to Ree exactly is.  Perhaps some will defend this as an intentional decision on the director’s part (after all, isn’t everybody in Missouri related?), but the surefire family members of Ree’s we meet are less than happy to see her, for fear she’ll draw the attention of local authorities to their illegal practices.  This leads to the film’s underwhelming final act, which is a half-hearted reconciliation with those estranged members and the final discovery about her father’s painful past.

If all of this sounds a tad familiar for the summer’s most “original Indie thriller,” it is.  Little in this story is unpredictable or interesting; when Ree enters a honky tonk with some good ol’ bluegrass playing, one expects to see the Soggy Bottom Boys warming up backstage.  What keeps the movie afloat is the character of Ree, who is interesting and eminently likable.  She doesn’t denounce her roots, and would never abandon her family.  Her compassion is remarkable, and she is head-and-shoulders smarter and more capable than anyone else around her – to an unrealistic extent.  Perhaps Winter’s Bone would have been more realistic if the story had been told in real time (à la 24), since the morons around her are so stupid, it really shouldn’t have taken Ree more than an hour and a half to find her father.

There is one excellent scene in Winter’s Bone that distinguishes itself from the rest of the dull story because it is believable and, among other things, better-lit.  It occurs when Ree talks to an army recruiter, who tells her that joining the military solely for the purposes of receiving compensation (as Ree unabashedly admits) is the wrong reason to join.  This scene says more about the character of Ree, the desperate situation she finds herself in, her boundless determination for a better life, and the inability to escape from backwoods life than all other scenes in the remainder of the film.  Heck, it even says more about military recruits than most movies.  It isn’t contrived for a second, and makes the viewer wonder what could have been if the rest of the movie had been conceived in such nuanced fashion.

Winter’s Bone is remarkably similar in tone, atmosphere, and plot to 2008’s Frozen River, except that film was not about drugs in Missouri, but illegal immigration on the Canadian border.  Both films emphasize female solidarity over male mistreatment and recklessness, and are graduates summa cum laude of the Thelma and Louise School of Man-Hating.  Hell, the main character in Winter’s Bone is named Ree Dolly, the protagonist in Frozen River is Ray Eddy.  Perhaps Debra Granik did not completely plagiarize Courtney Hunt (though apparently neither directress would have too much trouble banding up against strung-out male Hollywood directors), but the same problems exist in both films: Strong main characters hindered by overly colorful, poorly realized supporting characters, and a contrived storyline.

This is the type of movie that critics and glib film bullshitters will one-up each other in their use of complementary adjectives, such as “exquisite” and “revelatory” and “prodigious.”  The simple truth is that viewers need not mistake grainy gray visuals and trashy characters for some sort of cinematic liberal charity case.  Young Jennifer Lawrence has a bright future ahead of her (although one senses the most challenging part of playing Ree was not the accent or emotions, but making the chopping of wood and the firing of a rifle look natural.)  Maybe in her next film, she’ll be allowed to crack a smile, and hopefully we will, too.

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