Few times in recent years has a film truly stood out from the masses of derivative schlock that rule the silver screen in these dying days of Hollywood’s cinematic reign. Independent features and the resurgence of international cinema in the last two decades have put Hollywood in its place, and while a major motion picture event can still be exciting, the output from film’s smaller communities ultimately rewards the viewers infinitely more than the run-of-the-mill, big budget feature.
Though already whispered as the year’s best film thus far, not to mention the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Winter’s Bone” shines in both its rambling narrative and unabashed perspective of poverty and survival in rural America.
Admittedly, such a premise sounded like anthropological study fodder and a fluke. After viewing the film, however, nothing could stray further from the truth.
Based on Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel of the same name, the story falls into a canon of Woodrell’s making called “country noir,” which, as is implicit in the name, shows how some grassroots communities in rural America, most specifically the Missouri Ozarks, operate like organized crime syndicates.
Like the adaptation of Woodrell’s “Woe to Live On,” a Civil War guerilla thriller called “Ride With the Devil” on the big screen, “Winter’s Bone” explodes across the screen in a burst of realism that portrays the life of a family on the edge without ever exploiting the characters in some milquetoast moralist manner. The criminality of virtually every character introduced in the terse 100 minutes can only be judged in relation to the events on screen but never played up by implied biases of the viewer.
In addition to brutal thematic truth, characterization could not be finer. Jennifer Lawrence’s starmaking turn as Ree Dolly gives the film a heroine unsurpassed in American cinema in recent years, strong and resourceful, almost ungendered due to the responsibilities heaped on her by family and life, and ultimately a sleuth whose purpose and drive reflect both survivalism and selflessness. Ree’s search for her father puts her in direct conflict with the big Kahuna of the local meth scene, a vicious biker cowboy whose few lines seem to emit cool vapor as they leave his lips. Her few allies dwindle until only an errant uncle (a magnetic John Hawkes), almost certainly skirting death himself, decides that the life of his bloodkin is more important than his own.
Filmmaker Debra Granik’s second feature shocks on more levels than can be squeezed into a concise review, but needless to say that the film is only her second feature-length work speaks volumes about Granik’s ability to carry a dram through an almost non-narrative film, one whose story osmotes rather than assaults the viewer. Even adding doses of such unspeakable violence that rival Cormac McCarthy in scope, Granik balances the fictitious with the less believable truth, that such poverty and necessary tactics of survival exist in this country, and when added as a parallel of the Appalachias, in our own backyard.
