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MovieMail's Review
Set in rural Missouri, director Debra Granik's Winter's Bone combines social realism with a compelling narrative. Milo Wakelin applauds the performance of the year from Jennifer Lawrence.
This powerful adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s ‘country noir’ thriller boasts an outstanding performance from Jennifer Lawrence as a 17-year-old girl who must reluctantly track down her fugitive father who has vanished into the criminal underworld of the Ozark Mountains.
Set in the stark, beautiful landscape of rural Missouri, writer/director Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone combines social realism with a compelling narrative that is as emotionally involving as it is suspenseful.
It unflinchingly portrays the remains of a family: a young girl, Ree Dolly, her two younger siblings, and their mentally incapacitated mother. Ree cares and provides for them all as best she can, but news reaches her that their absent father has skipped bail, having put up the family home as security. If he misses his court date, their land is forfeit, and Ree can see no future beyond this.
The film follows Ree’s quietly determined attempts to locate her father, but the local community have closed ranks. Blood may be thicker than water, but here it’s mixed with crystal meth, and the characters she runs into are haggard, older than their years, and wary of informants and the authorities.
Huddled against the cold, Ree bravely faces the stony eyes of women guarding the doorways of their run-down homes, and the ever-present threat of violence from the men inside should she ask too many questions.
Ree Dolly is a remarkable, unforgettable heroine, and Jennifer Lawrence invests the role with absolute believability. The film’s bleak landscape evokes John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic The Road, and the story’s sense of all-pervading menace recalls the small-town horror of Twin Peaks.
Winter’s Bone provides a disturbing insight into a despairing world, but audiences who might recoil in disgust from these inbred, gun-toting, stranger-hating rednecks would do well to remember that Ree’s pride, values, resilience and self-sufficiency are cut from similar cloth. The difference is that, rather than trying to escape her life through drugs or crime, she is determined to make the best of things, whatever the odds. Her story of quiet resilience will inspire as well as provoke.
A tense thriller based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone is set in the poverty-stricken backwoods of the Ozarks and stars Jennifer Lawrence as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, who is forced to take care of her little brother and sister and her mentally-disabled mother after she discovers that her father, who has been running a crystal meth laboratory, has been arrested and has put the family home up as collateral for bail. Now, if he fails to attend the court hearing, the family will lose its home. Risking her own life and fiercely protecting her mother and younger siblings, Ree sets out to track down her father and piece together the truth behind his disappearance.
Winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, Winter's Bone was adapted for the screen by Granik and Anne Rosellini and based on the best-selling novel by Daniel Woodrel.
