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Published: Nov 3, 2010
Category: Drama
When I saw "Winter's Bone" in a theater six months ago, I was convinced it was the best movie I'd see this year. Other reviewers agreed. Audiences? This was a low-budget film, playing mostly in art houses in major cities --- how many people saw it?
Now "Winter's Bone" is a DVD, and, however it comes into your home, I'm hopeful that many more of you will be able to experience it. To buy it from Amazon costs less than a movie ticket and popcorn. Or you could rent it from Amazon and watch it now. Or you can download it from iTunes.
It's a different movie now. For one thing, the main character is a poor, rural girl whose family lives on the edge of financial disaster --- and in the last few months, haven't we heard politician after politician speak of people like this only as creeps who are gaming the system and need to be stripped of what little help we give them? And then it's about a family losing their home. Not because of any bank criminality, to be sure, but still... it shows how crucual a home is to a family. And then it's about a kid, 17-year-old Ree Dolly, who ought be going to school and getting on with her life --- it reminds you how many kids there are who are going through stuff you really don't want to think about.
So it's gonna cost you just to watch. "Winter's Bone" is set in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, and that's not a pretty place in winter: cramped trailers, plastic stretched over the windows, old trucks in the yard. In American movies, we don’t often see how badly some of us really live, but you will in “Winter’s Bone,” and you feel the grittiness of these lives. All in the service of authenticity --- the director, Debra Granik, set a lot of scenes in the homes of the locals. Shot digitally on a mingy budget, it's raw and unvarnished, like Hollywood never is.
The story is simple --- good thrillers usually are. Ree’s father, Jessup Dolly, was busted a while back for cooking methamphetamine. To make bond, he put up his family’s house and 300 acres of virgin timber. Now his court date is a week away --- and he’s nowhere to be found. The local lawman comes out to warn Ree that the Dollys are in danger of losing their home.
Ree’s mother has suffered a breakdown and is of no help, either in caring for her children or finding her husband. So, as in the best movies, the main character is on a mission. Ree must walk a knife edge; she can’t turn in her father, all she can do is ask for help in finding him so she can talk to him. And the only people who can help her? His relatives. Some of them make the most addictive drug on the planet. All of them don’t understand why she can’t remember she’s a Dolly --- “bred and buttered,” as she says --- and just stop. As they say, “Talking just causes witnesses.”
In its dramatic revelations, its dark surprises, and its no-nonsense portrayal of The Way We Are, the film feels almost like a Greek tragedy --- or an American Western. The trailer gives you a sense of the stakes and the seriousness:
There’s a good reason this film won the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Films and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance last winter --- every detail is right. Jenny Lawrence, who plays Ree, comes from Tennessee. John Hawkes, last seen in “Deadwood,” is Jessup’s brother; he’s also from the region and looks so much like a member of The Band that it’s eerie. Much of the cast is local and non-professional --- and, no offense, but they look like people who might make crank, who could scare the shit out of you at traffic lights with a sidelong glance, who would quiet you once with "I already told you to shut up with my mouth” and let their hands do the talking after that.
I’ve never seen a movie that's both painful to watch and impossible to turn away from. The scene in which the kids must deal with the fact that the meat for dinner is going to be squirrel. Ree’s desperate attempt to convince an Army recruiter --- who’s played by an Army recruiter --- to let her enlist for five years so she can collect the government’s $40,000 bonus. And a climax so remarkable, so distant from anything you know as reality, that you’ll never forget it.
Please see "Winter's Bone."