A Chilling Winter's Bone

By Steven Rosen
(Adapted From Cincinnati CityBeat)

Winter's Bone (Review)

The Sundance Film Festival has always offered a friendly home for naturalistic, rural/small-town-set family dramas with strong suspense/thriller elements; think Ulee’s Gold and last year’s Frozen River. Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone — winner of the Dramatic Film Grand Jury Prize and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance — continues that tradition, improving upon it in some ways but also coming on a little too strong.

Based on Daniel Woodrell’s novel, it tells of 17-year-old backwoods Ozarks girl named Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) who needs to get her missing meth-cooking father to a court date or her family will lose their log-cabin-style home because he jumped bail.

Because her mother has had an apparent breakdown, it’s up to Ree to take care of a younger brother and sister. She could also save the homestead, alternately, by finding proof dad has died — maybe in a messy squabble with other drug dealers, of whom the picturesque but impoverished Ozarks has its share.

The film manages well at incorporating an insightfully sociological -- and evocatively cinematographic -- sense of place, yet not getting bogged down either "meaning" or a rapturous take on nature. As Ree’s search for her father quickly takes hold, putting her in contact (and conflict) with some very tough (and haggard-looking) adults, the suspense elements rise.

Granik — who also co-wrote the screenplay — moves the action and terse dialogue around quickly and economically; you have to stay alert to keep abreast of what’s happening. And the characters are never cheap stereotypes — even the meanest are rendered with subtlety.

The outstanding Lawrence, who has a refreshing fresh-scrubbed innocence (she looks a bit like a young Jewel) to match her character’s spunk and grit, gets some strong support from John Hawkes, who plays her dangerous uncle Teardrop with the ferociousness yet smartness of a young Harry Dean Stanton. The film has some moments when Ree seems far tougher than her years, as when teaching her younger brother how to gut a squirrel. Other times, as in a wrenching climactic scene in a boat when her father's fate is put in her hands, she conveys a child's horror at the cruelty of her world.

But for all the emphasis on naturalism, that world depicted here seems too cut off from the rest of America as we know it to feel totally authentic. That’s brought home in a brilliant scene when Ree tries to enlist with a wise military recruiter — is this the only contact with the greater government (other than a small-town police officer) that she has? These aren't Davy Crockett days. Her total backwoods isolation doesn’t quite ring true for our modern times. Still, Winter's Bone reminds us that Americana can be chilling.

Grade: B-plus

Film Review | Winter's Bone

Cold Mountain

by Thomas Delapa

Almost six months—and two seasons—after it won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury prize, Winter’s Bone has been tossed into theaters, where its reception has ranged from frosty to feverish. That’s not surprising. By now, even art-house aficionados might be wary of Sundance’s predilection for dour independent dramas that are almost impossible to warm up to.

In bringing Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 “country noir” novel to the screen, director Debra Granik is visually diligent to extremes, sacrificing plot and character for bleakly naturalistic atmospherics. Set in the Missouri Ozarks, the bare-bones story sends one young woman on a lone, near-mythical quest to save her family from ruin. Before she’s done, 17-year-old Ree Dolly will have to summon the gumption to face down everyone from the local sheriff and burly bail bondsmen to icy neighbors and even her own crooked, meth-cooking clan.

Habeas Corpus might be a better title for this low-budget feature, since it’s the mysterious disappearance of Ree’s father that sends Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) on her perilous journey. Habitual criminal Jessup Dolly has jumped bail, and he’s put his family’s scruffy log-cabin homestead down for collateral. If Ree doesn’t find him right quick, she and her family will be left out in the Missouri cold.

Audiences simply looking for a scrupulous rendering of backwoods mid-America will find it in Granik’s dense, arresting visuals. Seemingly frozen in time (and attitudes), this is the sort of backwards Americana that the rest of the country has tried to forget, where rusty Ford pick-ups rule the dirt roads and locals skin squirrels and pick on banjos. But Li’l Abner has long since flown the coop in this mangy and decayed Dogpatch. Both the men and women folk have turned from raising chickens to cooking up “crank,” including Ree’s father.

At every turn in Ree’s twisted journey, she runs into dead ends, cold stares and flat-out hostility. Repeatedly turned back in her quest, she returns home, where she teaches her two younger siblings the fine art of gutting a squirrel. Proud and feisty, she refuses to take no for an answer, even if it means putting her life at risk. “Never ask for what ought to be offered,” is her drawling motto. Now the woman of the house, Ree is forced to take care of her withdrawn, emotionally disturbed mother.

But Granik and her co-screenwriter Anne Rosellini work backwards, building the film from the outside in and overlooking the dramatic forest for all those Missouri pine trees. They don’t piece together Ree’s meandering journey into a narrative whole, and nor are their supporting characters much more than a motley collection of grizzled backwoods types who look the part, but don’t do a lot else. As much as Granik would like to turn Ree into a kind of mystery-solving Ozark Oedipus (or Electra), she never blossoms as a full-bodied, flesh-and-blood heroine, no matter how gutsy she acts.

While it may have worked on the page, Granik’s grotesque, cold-blooded climax—accessorized with chain saw—is, hands down, the unkindest cut of all on the film’s credibility as drama.

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Originally published in Conducive Chronicle, 7/3/10