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Winter's Bone

6/16/2017

4 Comments

 

B+
​3.20

A young woman in the meth-infested Ozarks has to find her father before the courts seize her family's home.

Directed by Debra Granik
Starring Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes
​Initial Review by Shane Setnor

Picture
Everyone likes looking at a picture of themselves. It starts when we’re young, right? In the 80’s and 90’s, Polaroids were like magic and you couldn’t wave them fast enough to see how good the picture was. I remember being enthralled with the wizardry of watching myself on the TV as my uncle was filming us at Christmas in the 80’s. Today, people actually die trying to get pictures of themselves. Toddlers demand to see instant results of the picture or video on your phone.  There’s just something inherently satisfying about seeing ourselves. Maybe it’s an ego thing or maybe it’s just curiosity, but it’s always a powerful draw.

Winter’s Bone reminds me of that feeling of capturing a picture of your life. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Indiana and for part of that time in the country, but I -know- the people in this movie. It’s the same feeling I get when looking at a selfie. I just stared in awe and basked in the familiarity of the characters, their speech patterns and their mannerisms.

It’s a rare feat for Hollywood to include the subtle nuances that go with living in the country. Country people can be terrifying, but it’s not in the Let’s-Rape-These-City-Boys way. It’s not (usually) in an overt racist manner. It comes from a terrifying ambiguity of the way they talk and look. Usually folks in the country have worked hard, and it wares on their face and skin. And if someone has on dirty clothes, it could be out of desperation or it could be because they were working that day. So when someone throws out a term like “child” and follows it up with something serious or demanding, it leaves you confused. And that confusion is more terrifying than a, “I’m gonna beat your ass.”

Winter’s Bone 100% accurately encapsulates this fear. Far better than any movie about people in the country has ever done before. Not only do we know and recognize the cast, but we relate to Jennifer Lawrence (Ree Dolly), who is outstanding at combining a look of innocence with a fuck-you-stay-out-of-my-way attitude. I’m not certain how many actresses could believably pull off the performance that Lawrence does, and without it, we’re looking at a B- movie.

Perhaps the most frightening of all was John Hawkes as Teardrop. Hawkes always has a quiet confidence about him and that, combined with his wiry frame, reminds me of any dozen characters I’ve seen in rural bars that have terrified me to be around. The type where you don’t want to even talk with them because they seem so unpredictable and uncaring about anything but their most base and immediate emotions.

The way Lawrence and Hawkes dance with these characters and fulfill a believable arc of change is what takes this movie from a B+ to an A-.

It falls short of an A, however. The movie does pace a bit slowly in the middle third. Also, some of the side actors who are most definitely not professional actors, are a bit flat. None more than the terrifying than Ronnie Stray Dog Hall (Thump) who can’t quite keep up with John Hawkes.

Overall, the authentic feel of this movie is so rich and familiar that I can’t help but recommend it to anyone who has ever lived in a rural or semi-rural setting.

A-
4 Comments
Cooker
6/20/2017 12:33:13 pm

I watched Winter’s Bone not too long ago, and I see that on Netflix I only gave it 2 out of 5 stars; I scored it a C+ on the spreadsheet.

I remember the story and the scenes involving the attack on Ree by the crime boss guy’s women and fetching the arms from the lake; I must’ve had serious issues with the pacing, easily my number one gripe about movies. Either that or it was just difficult to relate to the environment of the creepy back-woods ensemble; not too many of those folk in the northern Indy suburbs. Sticking with the C+

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Jon
6/22/2017 01:01:23 am

In the recently reviewed I Am Not Your Negro (http://www.mediocremovie.club/side-pieces/i-am-not-your-negro) , author and thinker James Baldwin talks about white culture as being so homogenous and boring that he would just as soon never spend any more time in the US. What brings him back is the culture of black Americans like him, who've been able to carve out a unique spot amidst centuries of injustice. Baldwin speaks a lot of truth about ever-sprawling suburban consumerist culture, but the communities of Winter's Bone have capital-C Culture, though it's not for export. If a white bail bondsman in a sedan is unwelcome, then a black intellectual may as well be from Mars. Debra Granik's film, adapted from a series from Ozark native Daniel Woodrell, is mired in a decaying subculture, showing the viewer the rules and what keeps its members around both willingly and unwillingly.

A big marker of this Southern Missouri culture is the living spaces. There's a sliding scale between the large house that the bluegrass birthday party is in, the Stump family property with its refuse piles, and the Dolly estate, all likely passed down through the generations. For those like Teardrop, who didn't get the big property inheritance like his brother Jessup did, sadder apartments and houses that lack the lived-in feel are the way to go. There's a flattening taking place outside of these rugged properties, where something will be truly lost on the future day that the banjo-playing grandson, as the eventual heir, decides that he'd rather live somewhere else and his grandmother's house must be sold. His family's new home will be less drafty, but not as warm.

Within these homes, Granik never engages in poverty porn, where the viewer is left to gasp at how poor and depraved the characters onscreen are (see Precious crying over a stolen bucket of fried chicken). Ree's younger siblings, so beautifully introduced in the first frames of the film, aren't shown in misery or privation, but playing around happily with what they've got. At this moment, their lives are hard, but not devoid of cheer or hope. The latter comes in most particularly with Jennifer Lawrence's Ree, a stand-in teenage matriarch since their mother's incapacitation. She knows her family's tenuous state better than anyone in the house, before and after the sheriff arrives, but hopeless people aren't resolute and they don't take half measures when they present themselves. A lot of her neighbors might be hopeless, but Ree risks her life because she believes in the payoff, which is continued existence in her home as a high school dropout, taking care of her family. As a stand-in for rural white communities, she might lack for imagination, but she has an unshakable idea of what's best for her and hers.

It would be easy for Granik, a Massachusetts-born MFA-holder, to show Ree's quest as a futile one where completion only earns her more time in a backwoods hell-hole. Instead, she remembers to show the blessings that come with this way of life alongside the curses. The countryside has been ravaged by meth use and production, no doubt. Small-time agriculture and law enforcement seem to be the only upright professions for those that want to stay, with the military as only option for those who want to leave. It's to Granik's great credit that she is able to get the viewer to consider, however briefly, that there might still be something worth hanging onto here. The code of silence that everyone lives by is great for the meth business, but the same code guarantees that neighbors are always ready to help each other out when their considerable skills of self-sufficiency prove insufficient. I keep coming back to the family bluegrass band, several generations sonically solidifying their bond with beautiful music and no small amount of liquor. The feeling is that meth is a phase but that bond is written in stone. Granik doesn't go too far in the other direction and romanticize, but she sees clearly, where no group is all good or all bad, as true for the people of Winter's Bone as it is for any other group.

Reply
Jon
6/22/2017 01:02:03 am

That sentiment is fully contained in John Hawkes' portrayal of Teardrop. His introduction is the polar opposite of his nieces and nephews, prowling around his home and lashing out like a soulless predator. By the end of the film, as he heads towards his likely death in a cycle of honor killings, he's decided to reject the culture that ensured his brother's murder but not before engaging in a little banjo music one last time. Ree can forgive or at least forget, but he cannot do either. Both Lawrence and Hawkes are excellent in Winter's Bone, with Lawrence establishing the type that will make her famous and Hawkes playing against his accommodating role in Deadwood. Again, Granik lets her characters be several things at once. The steadfast and stoic Ree is allowed to be scared and the gaunt and coiled Teardrop is allowed to drop his guard.

One of the more interesting facets of the opiate crisis is that conservative commentators have started talking about whites the way they've often talked about blacks. These people just need some personal responsibility to escape from poverty, or they should leave for greener pastures. What's keeping you in a place like Southern Missouri or East St. Louis? Winter's Bone provides some of the answer in showing how not much is sometimes enough, and how not all to be valued can be plugged into a spreadsheet. The bail bondsman advises Ree to sell her woods, turning 100 year trees into nubs. The writers at the National Review would undoubtedly cosign on that recommendation. Ree Dolly recoils at the idea. She might change her mind if things take a turn, but those are her family's trees, and it seems like she's related to everyone. A-

Reply
Blair
6/28/2017 10:52:27 pm

Jennifer Lawrence killed it. Captures rural life in a fantastic way. A-

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