By K. A. Laity
Debra Granik's film of the novel by Daniel Woodrell offers a bleak world and an engaging 17-year-old heroine, Ree Dolly. She's not fighting (or kissing) vampires, she's not wondering what boys think of her and she's not shopping. Ree (played with finesse and grace by the amazing Jennifer Lawrence) takes care of her younger siblings and her mentally ill mother, dreams of joining the Army as a solution to her problems and needs to find her missing ne'er-do-well father really badly.
The film is full of women and there's not a Manolo to be seen. The women aren't made up and airbrushed. They come in all shapes and sizes—and personalities. While each one is memorable and distinct (how many mainstream films can you say that about?), perhaps the most striking character of all is the matriarch Merab, played with terrifying realism by Dale Dickey. The interactions between Ree and Merab are shot so full of tension that you could hear the audience not breathing in the theatre. Winter's Bone was the first movie in eons that I had no idea where it would go, but I couldn't wait to find out.
While some people have pooh-poohed the depiction of rural Appalachian life with its meth labs and squirrel hunting, it’s a world many urban folk don’t see. Woodrell grew up in Missouri and did go off to join the Marines, so I suspect he may know a lot more than some of the reviewers. His support of the film suggests he was mostly happy with how it turned out, too. While the accents may differ the poverty the film depicts exists across the relatively wealthy nation, just as much here in upstate New York where I write this. The despair is real.
Yet Granik and DP Michael McDonough find a stark beauty in every frame. Harsh as this world proves to be over and over, it's also a rich one that you can imagine being hard to leave if your roots go deep. The details lingered over bring it to life. Shots of Ree trudging familiar paths on her quest to locate her father pack in all kinds of information about the world she lives in.
It's a harsh one and stratified: like many traditional cultures, the gender divide is an unbridgeable gap. "Don’t you have any menfolk to do this?" Ree gets asked at one point. A large part of the hostility she faces comes from her appropriation of a male role. The men and women violently reinforce the status quo. The women Ree must face embody that familiar patriarchal phenomenon: women accorded a small amount of power in their separate sphere work doggedly to hold onto it by using it against the women below them. There's no recognition that they share a similarly oppressed position.
Winter's Bone, while harrowing, offers one of the most satisfying movie experiences I've had yet this year. Seek it out and see what wonders await you.
Image via WintersBoneMovie.com