Henry Saw: Winter's Bone

Great film and further proof that 2010 has been a strange year for movies...


So I was looking over my Top Ten lists for 2008 and 2009 and was struck by the fact that both lists had at least one big film in the Top Five. I'm not cynical about the summer movie season, I love blockbusters when they are done right, and consider Iron Man and Taken to be some of the better movies of the last few years. I felt fine putting them right up there with The Hurt Locker and Slumdog Millionaire.

This year my favorite films have been an intimate Argentinian murder mystery, a British coming of age tale about a troubled girl, a documentary about street art, and an Australian crime movie that was in theaters for less than a month. Outside of Shutter Island, a film that was controversially delayed and derided, all of my favorite films have been very small. Well we can add another tiny movie to that list...because Winter's Bone is fantastic.



Winter's Bone, co-written and directed by Debra Granik, is the story of a 17 year old girl named Ree Dolly living in the Ozarks. Ree lives in poverty with her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother. Ree is forced to be both a mother and father to her brother and sister but cannot wait until she is able to join the army and get out of Missouri. One day the town sheriff shows up and tells her that her father, who was arrested for cooking Meth, is missing. The problem is that he put their house up for his bail bond and if he is not found they will lose their home. Ree realizes she has to try to find her father and convince him to turn himself in. Ree must go see her extended family, all of whom are also involved with drugs and quite scary, and who do not want Ree poking around...

To say Winter's Bone is a stark film would be an understatement. There's a refreshing frankness, and a unique silence, to much of the film. Granik avoids the temptation to go overly "arty" with her direction, but also avoids the documentary style that would also have been easy to slip into, and instead gives us a film that evokes the best work of the Coens or Polanksi. It's a startlingly well managed film, perfectly paced, and produces the tensest scenes I've seen this year. Given how strong a year it has been for thrillers...that's a real achievement.



Much of the film rests on Jennifer Lawrence's performance as Ree Dolly and she proves herself, like her character, quite able to carry the load. This is the best lead performance from a young actress I've seen in a few years. This surpasses Carey Mulligan's lovely performance in An Education, Kiera Knightley's vindicating work in The Duchess, or Ellen Page's spark-fire role in Juno. Lawrence perfectly captures Ree as a girl who is both wise, and tough, beyond her years but also put in a situation well over her head. We instantly believe her love for her siblings and her family, yet we can sympathize with her desire to escape, and we are with her character through every beat. Whether its teaching her younger sister to spell, begging her non-responsive mother for help, or starring down a coven of antagonistic female relatives...I've never seen a young actress be better in a film. Lawrence's beauty, which is there but not important, only serves to inform a few scenes in the film; it's not important for the character but it is a part of her.

She's aided by strong supporting work from Garret Dillahunt as the town sheriff, Dale Dickey playing the wife to the town kingpin, and John Hawkes as her uncle Teardrop. Hawkes is the other real standout of the picture. He fills in a character painted in broad-strokes by the script and owns one of the great scenes in the film (the confrontation with the sheriff).

The dialogue is stylized, sometimes to a distracting degree, but in a strange way that works for the film. Winter's Bone, in its own way, could be described as a film-noir. Part of that genre is generating a certain way of talking for its characters. Watch The Big Sleep, or Brick for that matter, and try to imagine anyone talking like that in real life...it doesn't work. Noir is not a genre that demands realism but instead requires heightened directness. The important thing is that the actors sell each line, no matter how stilted, and that the audience understands. John Hawkes best understands the kind of film he's in, and reaches iconic status in each scene he's in, and is one of the better anti-heroes I can think of in recent noir films.



Winter's Bone is a refreshing work. It's not perfect: Some performances don't resonate and some plot lines are not followed through on...but it's easy to see why this won the big prize at Sundance. Lawrence knocks this one out of the park and the entire film is an engrossing, suspenseful, and fascinating experience. Despite the dark subject matter, there's a decency to the whole piece that can be seen in the sentiment expressed by Ree towards her siblings, and her determination to rescue them. It's a movie about family and how we are willing to go through anything for our loved ones...Winter's Bone really stuck a chord with me.

Just an amazing little movie, well deserving of all the praise and awards it has received, and something you must see.

Grade: A

Best Scene: When Teardrop rescues Ree from a barn...