Movie Review: Winter's Bone

by Dan Pickles, Staff Writer

Some movies never get the chance they deserve.  It’s the nature of show business, I suppose; many movies – both good and great – don’t get the distribution they need because they aren’t designed to be blockbusters. In today’s movie-market, unless you toss in a few robot fights, giant sharks, or earthy aliens that ride space dragons, you probably aren’t going get a great deal of industry attention. Such is the case with Winter’s Bone.

There’s a strong possibility that you’ve never heard of Winter’s Bone. Over the last few days I’ve been telling people about it and I’m inevitably greeted by one of two reactions. The first is a joke about the title; the second is a “what’s that?” complete with puzzled look. 

To answer that question: Winter’s Bone is a movie about Ree, a girl searching for her bail-skipping, meth-cooking father, after he defaults on a bail bond for which he used their house as collateral. If he can’t be turned up, the house becomes the property of the bondsmen, and Ree, her two younger siblings, and their mentally unstable mother are turned out into the streets – or woods, as it were.  Given the nature of her father’s work, his associates are less than enthusiastic at Ree’s attempts to find him.

Daniel Woodrell, who wrote the book upon which the film is based, has characterized the story’s narrative style as country noir. This is obviously a far-removed cousin of the hard-boiled detective stories of the 40’s, 50’s and beyond; but despite a change in setting and characters, the atmosphere remains. If you’re from the Midwest, the south, or a similarly rural area, the people and places in Ree’s quest may actually hold more resonance for you than the typical mobster-filled cityscapes of traditional noir. Hollywood often gets caught-up in the notion that small towns are filled with quaint people going about quaint business; Winter’s Bone offers an alternate view, suggesting that the world’s metropolises don’t hold the patent on hopelessness – it can, and does, exist everywhere.

The characters of the film smack of realism, from start to finish. Ree, as played by Jennifer Lawrence, is a morose heroine without the least hint of pretention. She does what she does mechanically, having been forced into it by the actions of her father. She isn’t a martyr or a reluctant hero – just a woman going about an extremely ugly mission in any way she can. Her only aid is her volatile, meth-basted uncle, Teardrop – played by one of my fellow Minnesotans, John Hawkes. I’ll try not to lapse into nerdy hyperbole here, but it’s hard not to; Hawkes’ portrayal of Teardrop will leave you thinking he’s horrifying and sympathetic in equal measures, and you just can’t ask for much more than that. The characters will pop off the screen and leave you wanting more, to say the least.

Yet, despite all this goodness, you’ll probably never see a trailer for Winter’s Bone on television – and that, my friends, is a real injustice. Fortunately for you, it runs through September 23rd at our local Zinema2 Theater.  If you’re in the market to see a movie, this is well worth it.

In other news, the fact that I’m here typing this and you’re here reading it is a dead giveaway that we’re back from summer break. I’m glad to see you, and I hope you feel the same about me (check yes and send this back if you do). 

It was a long, slow summer as far as movies go, but there are some interesting prospects on deck for the fall. I’ll be going to a lot of movies, and hopefully they won’t all be crap. We’ll see. I’ve held that naïve hope in prior years, only to have it die shivering in my hands like a wounded bird.  One way or the other, I’m looking forward to it.

Until next week, friends…