Winter’s Bone (2010)

Winter’s Bone is film noir in indie-film clothing. Oh, sure – it mixes credible actors with regional locals and lovingly films a bleakly beautiful swath of America. But the film is after myth, not sociology. There’s realism here, but overall, Winter’s Bone is less PBS than Faulkner, and the movie is all the stronger for it. This movie is tough to take, but it will stick with you.

The plot centers on 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence, all of 19 during filming), a tough-beyond-her-years Ozarks teen who is essentially raising her younger siblings. He mother lives with them, but says little and does less. Some sort of mental illness. All Ree will say is “My mom is sick.” Her dad? Well, he’s been in and out of jail for cooking meth. He’s out now, but not at home. One day the sheriff pulls up. Ree’s dad is due in court. He’s posted the family home as bail. If he doesn’t show, the rest of the Dollys are homeless. Ree vows to track him down and make him show, if she can.

From there the movie tracks Ree’s attempts to locate her missing father. She starts with his former meth-cooking buddies – most of them distant kin. But they won’t talk. “Talkin’,” one says, “just creates witnesses.” Slowly Ree begins to uncover things about her family—-immediate and extended—-that are probably better left unknown. The trouble is, Ree no longer has the luxury of not knowing.

What Ree discovers, and what help and hurt she gets from her kin, including her not exactly avuncular uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) and fearsome clan matriarch Merab (Dale Dickey), are best not revealed here. The solution to the mystery, wonderfully Gothic though it is, is only part of the pleasure of Winter’s Bone. Just as remarkable is Ree’s journey itself. Working from a novel by Daniel Woodrell, director Debra Granik and co-writer Anne Rosellini fashion a gripping tale of self-reliance and family honor. Ree is formidable. She cooks, hunts game, stares down surly relatives and takes beatings all with equal poise. Her situation is dire, but she doesn’t want charity (“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” she tells her brother). What she wants is decency. Turns out that’s harder to come by.

Woodrell’s novels have been called “country noir,” and Winter’s Bone works both halves of that label with success. The filmmakers shot completely on location, in real Ozarks houses, and peopled the cast with local citizens. Robert Duvall took a similar approach to The Apostle, and as in that film, the results in Winter’s Bone are palpable. The place is a character here, and the film feels lived-in. We feel like we come in in the middle of something much older, and that’s exactly right. It also helps that, though stereotypical flourishes appear (mountain music, trailers), the people Ree meets are not allowed to descend into caricature. There are dangerous folk aplenty, but no real villains. You probably wouldn’t want to back Ree in a corner, either.

As for the noir angle, not only does the plot follow the traditional gumshoe shape (including roughings-up, shifty lawmen, and unexpected help), but the movie grasps the central dynamic of film noir: the unlikely insertion of a moral character into an amoral world. Ree has a moral code; she expects family to do the right thing. Not all agree. The movie’s drive comes from that disagreement.

All this makes Winter’s Bone sound like a thriller, which it is, in its way—but not an action thriller. This is an acting movie, and the home-run here belongs to Jennifer Lawrence. Miss Lawrence is too round-faced and healthily pretty to really be this girl, but that’s the movies for you. What she does is let her appearance go hang and build up Ree from the inside. Eyes narrowed, jaw set, and feet planted, Lawrence embodies Ree’s determination. It’s a tough little performance, and it sells the film. Ree isn’t cute or lovable, but we root for her because she is who she is. The turn got Lawrence an Oscar nod, and deservedly so. John Hawkes also grabbed a nomination for his work as Teardrop, which is a fine study in quiet menace.

Adding nicely to the mix is the dialogue, much of which I assume is straight from or close to Woodrell’s actual words. These characters speak with the sort of terse crackle associated with Elmore Leonard or Cormac McCarthy. When an erstwhile enemy shows up on Ree’s porch, Ree brandishes a gun, plainly saying she wants to “blow a big hole clean through your f---ing guts.” “I know you do,” the enemy replies, “but you won’t.” Or consider Teardrop, pointedly hushing his wife by saying “I already said shut up with my mouth.”

This is dark stuff, and Winter’s Bone won’t be to everyone’s liking. But if some of the literary names dropped throughout this review sound like your cup of tea (with a bit of Jack Daniels in it), then this film is worth finding on DVD. In one of my favorite exchanges, Ree admits to her uncle “You always have scared me.” “That’s ‘cause you’re smart,” Teardrop replies. Smart and scary – that’s the Dolly family. That’s Winter’s Bone.