Winter's Bone

This is the movie I get to be indignant about when Oscar season rolls around. It’s going to round up some awards from the critics circles when those start coming out, and it may well bring in a couple of token Oscar nominations; but it’s not going to win anything, and some watered-down, easily swallowed pill passing for art - or maybe not even that - will win the big awards. (I thought it had even helped me come to a better understanding of what the concept of “art film” really means to me; but it turned out, when I sat down to write about it, that it still wasn’t all that clear, and that the solid line of reasoning that was in my head on the drive home didn’t actually look all that good when I got it down on paper. But even having said all of that, I know for sure that this is a “real” art film, even if I can’t tell you exactly what I think that means.)

It’s the story of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence, in a towering, star-making performance), a Missouri teenager who has to find her fugitive father or face losing the house where she lives and takes care of her two younger siblings and her mentally ill mother. Pops put up the house and their land as his bond in order to make bail after his most recent arrest for cooking meth in the Missouri Ozarks. When the law turns up on Ree's doorstep one day, she finds out about the bond, and that her father has disappeared, only days before he is due to appear in court. She doesn’t panic…doesn’t flip out and start screaming at the cop; instead, she just looks him squarely in the eye and says, “I’ll find him.”

Ree is neither prideful nor arrogant in making such a statement. She is simply responding to the latest crisis in the most pragmatic way, identifiying the solution to a problem and saying that she will take care of it - not because she wants to or because she thinks she can or because she knows how she’s going to do it, but because it is the only for her to do. Roger Ebert notes quite astutely in his review that it’s something of a wonder that a girl as seemingly well-adjusted, resourceful, intelligent, and drug-free could have survived seventeen years in this place and not been brought down by any of the myriad things that have ravaged the community where Ree lives.

Not a soul in this movie is what you would call cosmopolitan, and nearly all of them are moving from one bad decision to the next mostly because they don’t know any other way. Drugs are rampant, and there isn’t really any law. Sure, there’s a county sheriff, but reputation and honor carry more weight than a badge in this neck of the woods. For these people, life isn’t about being first in line to get the new iPhone - it’s about basic survival. It’s about learning to shoot a rifle at the age of six so that when you have to hunt squirrel in order to have something to eat for dinner, you can. After they skin the squirrels, they disembowel them and Ree’s little brother Sonny asks if they are going to eat the innards. Her answer is simple, honest, and - most of all - telling: “Not yet.”

Most of the other characters are frightening people, their reputations framed in the stories told about them by others. Every little thing left unsaid about each character allows the suspense to build organically as Ree’s search for her father drags her slowly into a web of secrets that everyone knows but no one will talk about. Characters described as dangerous are often not shown on screen until many scenes later, their power demonstrated through proxies - in many ways, not unlike the manner in which the Mafia operates. Here, though, there’s no kicking up to the captain, who kicks up to the boss; and there are no fur coats or diamond rings or extravagant dinner parties. Here, you keep a secret or you disappear.

Jennifer Lawrence is the one who will draw the most attention for this movie - both because she does a great job and because not nearly enough people are interested in writing for there to be much of a to-do over the adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel here; and that’s too bad, because the adaptation is remarkable. The actors carry off the sometimes spare dialogue extremely well, which is to their credit as much as to that of the screenwriter; but there is so much about so many of the characters that is left unsaid that I kept thinking, throughout the film, that I absolutely had to read the novel the very minute the credits rolled and the house lights came up.

That hasn’t happened yet, though; and I still don’t know for sure how I would explain or define what a “real” art film is, nor whether or not it is worthwhile even to attempt to define the parameters of a “real” art film. That’s an essay for another time, if I can ever manage to write it. For now, I suppose it’s enough to say that Winter’s Bone is an incredible achievement - a nearly perfect film, and better than most of the other films I’ve watched this year combined. (In fact, after checking a list of films released in New York this year, it seems that I have seen a total of nine of them; and even the ones I had previously thought that I really liked paled in comparison to this one.)