Winter's Bone

I’ll admit that the opening moments of Winter’s Bone made me nervous: children playing in a scrubby backyard under cloudy skies; a lonesome tune sung in flinty a capella on the soundtrack; shots of shirts and socks on a clothesline, blown by an uncaring Missouri wind. So go the first scenes of many a painfully earnest indie drama about the hardscrabble lives of the rural poor, their efforts to honor their underrepresented characters nevertheless touched by a certain anxious condescension. Such films seem more interested in showcasing the filmmaker’s own good intentions than breathing life into a little-seen milieu. The sober self-importance of the telling overtakes the tale being told.

But my worries proved unfounded. Winter’s Bone takes the familiar material of broken families and grimy, low-level crime and infuses it with an emotional force almost folkloric in its clarity. What begins as a story of a daughter in search of her derelict father becomes a sobering tale of initiation, as the questing teenager becomes schooled, sometimes brutally, in the ways of a desolate world unto itself.

The otherness of that world—its sayings, rituals, and complicated web of familial loyalty and cold-eyed survival—proves crucial to the film’s enveloping power. Though stubbornly empathetic toward her characters, director Debra Granik makes little attempt to place the Ozarks setting on some continuum of contemporary experience, so that city-slicker viewers might more easily grasp its grim, mud-spattered spirit. It is a place set apart, where modern conveniences like electric heaters have simply passed the community by. (Rarely mentioned by its characters, Granik never lets us forget that such absences can be traced back to choking poverty as much as regional distinctiveness.) People cling to their land and what few possessions they own, behavior that Granik quietly explains in the way she shoots the heavily-wooded land as one continuous space, with property lines largely invisible save for the owners who fiercely insist upon their presence. (Granik and DP Michael McDonough shot the film on location in the Ozarks.) If you don’t claim it, it will get taken by someone else or ground down by the unforgiving elements.

Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) knows this world well already. A seventeen-year-old with long, dirty-blonde hair and alert features, she dropped out of school some time ago to raise younger siblings Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson) and their mentally-ill mother. She dreams of joining the Army: mostly for the money, although she is also a good shot with her father’s squirrel gun. That gun and their cabin are about the only valuable things he left his family before leaving; when the film begins, he has just been released on bail after getting caught cooking meth. An officer arrives in the front yard and tells Ree that her father used the cabin as bail to get out. Unless he makes his upcoming court date, the house will be taken from them. So begins Ree’s journey to find out what has become of him.

As she travels under perennially gray skies to ask various family members, friends, and strangers (everyone seems connected by blood or involvement in the local drug market), Ree’s meetings take on an increasingly sinister undertone. Her questions unsettle the townsfolk, most notably her bitter, drug-sniffing uncle Teardrop (John Hawkins), who responds to her plight with indifference and shiftily denies knowing her father is. When she continues to press forward with her search, they respond with collective and eventually violent warnings, urging her not to dig too deeply into his disappearance. Granik—who adapted the eponymous novel by Daniel Woodrell with Anne Rosellini—isn’t interested in milking the mystery of the situation, though, so much as investigating alongside Ree the dark depths to which the community will go to keep their secrets. Her repeated encounters with brutish men and weathered women speak to the harshness of their lives, but also to the collective bond of hard-living they all share. The repetitions of these meetings and Granik’s focus on the physical treks Ree takes to get from here to there gives Winter’s Bone a touch of the mythic. Her eventual discovery of the truth behind her father’s whereabouts gains its power not only from Ree’s understanding of this situation, but the larger truth of how adult life truly works within this rough, insular, and inextricably connected mini-universe.

Winter’s Bone is a somber film in many respects, but it’s far from a downer. Granik has a poetic eye for the ephemeral moments of beauty and grace amidst the gloom: melting icicles hanging off a rocking horse; kids whooping and climbing over bales of hay. And she gets performances of such lived-in specificity from her large ensemble that even the most perfunctory encounters carry a weight and history. (Many of the supporting roles were played by non-actors from the local area.) This proves especially true of Lawrence, a magnetic screen presence who balances gritty determination with a heartrending vulnerability. You can feel her accumulating burden of responsibility and hopelessness growing over the course of the film, making interludes like the scenes when she teaches Ashlee and Sonny to shoot all the more lovely for the respite they offer both the characters and the viewer. By film’s end, we’re relieved that Ree’s life has achieved a fragile equilibrium, but it’s shadowed by our awareness that the journey she has taken has drawn her even further into a world of dark knowledge and constricting communal ties. She has found the truth, but that’s no guarantee it will set her free.

                                            Matt Connolly