Winter’s Bone
Cinema Nova, 06/12/2010
Status: Behind by 6 films
Ree (JENNIFER LAWRENCE, The Burning Plain) is 17, lives in the thickest of hillbilly country and cares for her mentally unwell mum and two younger siblings. Her dad, who she hasn’t seen for weeks, is about to skip on his bond, which means they’ll lose the house and the family will be split up. She goes searching for him, asking tough questions of some pretty terrifying hillbilly-gangsters including her uncle Teardrop (JOHN HAWKES, Deadwood, Me and You and Everyone We Know).
Winter’s Bone is bleak, hard and really, really well done. Performances are great and the script is terrific. Great design means that the dirt under folks’ fingernails looks real and the rips in people’s jeans aren’t nice and trendy. Actually shot in the place in which it’s set (the Ozark mountains slap bang in the middle of Hicktown USA) adds authenticity and gives it a very austere and lonely feel. The whole thing reeks of poverty and desperation.
The central mystery of Jessup Dolly’s whereabouts takes it’s time to unfold in a nice neo-noir kind of way and it seems like writer-director DEBRA GRANIK is more interested in characters and the complex social structure of small-time meth-cooking hillbillies than anything else. But that’s okay, because so am I.
