Winter's Bone

With her second feature, writer/director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) delivers the kind of transcendent, richly textured, and astutely observed independent film that comes around maybe once a decade. Setting her story in the backcountry of the Missouri Ozarks, where the Crystal Meth epidemic has turned an already poverty-stricken, intentionally off-the-grid community into a desolate wasteland of isolation and violence, Granik introduces us to fascinating and terrifying American characters rarely found on the big screen. 

Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone tells the story of Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old girl who has taken on the primary responsibilities in her family. She looks after her twelve-year-old brother, and six-year-old sister, making sure they are clean and fed, and teaching them the basic skills they must learn to survive in their harsh environment. Her mother is disabled and mentally ill and her father’s whereabouts have been unknown since he was released from jail following an arrest for cooking meth. The story is launched when a local Sheriff arrives informing Ree that her family home will be repossessed in a week because her dad put it up as part of his bail and then disappeared. In order to not lose her home, Ree sets out to find her father before his court date. But by confronting kinfolk who don’t speak about the illegal business they’re all a part of (and most don’t speak to women at all) she must violate a different kind of law—the local customs and cultural traditions that maintain her community's clannish masculine hierarchy.

Ree’s journey uncovers mysteries that can’t be solved because everyone she encounters doesn’t want them solved—for several intriguing reasons. She must expose herself to great risk and endure a harsh punishment at the hands of her duplicitous neighbors and relatives to reach an objective she (and the audience) assumes will be bleak at best. Thus, what starts out as an excellent social-realist indie, along the lines of Courtney Hunt’s terrific recent Oscar-nominated Frozen River (2008), slowly transforms into the best film noir of the past twenty years. And the tough, wise-beyond-her-years Ree, played by twenty-year-old Jennifer Lawrence (Garden Party, The Burning Plain, The Poker House), is one of the most compelling screen characters to come along in ages.

Granik’s Down to the Bone made a star out of Vera Farmiga, but Winter's Bone should launch young Lawrence into the cinematic stratosphere. Appearing in virtually every frame of this movie—her steely, focused gaze and calm, husky, authoritative voice never wavering despite how deep in over her head Ree gets, Lawrence turns in the best performance by any actor this year. The dynamite supporting cast match Lawrence’s power in every simply but exquisitely devised and executed scene. Most notable are John Hawkes (Identity, Me and You and Everyone We Know, American Gangster) as her drug addict uncle Teardrop, and Dale Dickey (The Pledge, Domino, and two memorable episodes of Breaking Bad) as the wife of the clan’s head man. Through the intense, nearly wordless interactions of Ree with her bitter, grizzled, unpredictable family members, we see come to understand a little bit about this mountain culture, what it was before the Meth and what it’s become.

As authentically “lived-in” as the cast makes these characters seem, Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough (who is also an associate producer) create a realistic, unflashy visual aesthetic more compelling than anything captured in the last ten years of Best Cinematography Oscar winners. The wintery Ozarks setting is so distinctive that every shot in Winter’s Bone takes hold of the viewer and shows us something we’ve not seen before. Much of this is due to the brilliantly sparse screenplay by Granik and Anne Rosellini, who capture Woodrell’s narrative pace and regional color while never losing the sensation that this story is unfolding in a way no one—its characters, its authors, its viewers—can fully predict. Wide shots that illustrate the condition of each domicile and close-ups of the characters’ weathered faces infer volumes of backstory while simultaneously broadening the viewer’s understanding of how little we know or can even assume about these individuals. 

Winter’s Bone contains layer upon layer of themes and subtext making it a movie you want to revisit over and over despite its unflinchingly dark subject matter. Like all great film noirs, the experience of each scene is heightened when you know the final outcome. It is both one of the most frightening movies of the decade and one that leaves you feeling strangely hopeful. We get so swept up in the unflinching determination and realistic unflappability of the central character that we cannot help but feel empowered and invigorated as we watch her strive to secure a future for herself and her young siblings. The picture should make both Granik and Lawrence major players in the coming decade.