Review

Review Date: 11-July-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Winter's Bone (2010)

One of the wonderful things about movies is that they grant access to cultures and places that audiences will probably never see on their own. In the case of Winter's Bone, this year's big winner at the Sundance Film Festival, the place and culture are ones that I hope never to see myself, yet the fascination remains. The story unfolds in the Missouri boondocks where subsistence living is based on drugs and violence is an everyday mode of communication for both men and women. Scruffy curs mill around ramshackle houses. Children play among weeds and rusting machinery. Dinner is fried squirrel if a person is lucky enough to shoot one. Women breed young and get old early. Everyone is related to everyone else but suspicion hangs over them like smog. The banjo music may be quaint but that's as far as the whimsy goes.

The interest of this world, in addition to its brutal exoticism, is that it serves as the backdrop for a quest by a hero who is very strong, very brave, and very alone. The hero's name is Ree Dolly, and she is a 17-year-old girl. One look into the steely blue eyes of Jennifer Lawrence, the riveting leading lady who plays her, and it is apparent that Ree has the mettle to survive. She proudly cares for two young siblings and a mother whom the harshness of life has rendered semi-comatose. She accepts offerings from neighbors but never stoops to beg. Her father has disappeared while out on bail for drug charges, and if he does not reemerge for his court date the family will be kicked off their land. Ree decides to find him, partly out of longing but mostly out of a determination to keep her loved ones in their home. Although her father never strayed far from their hills, her search takes on aspects of an odyssey.

Ree is not entirely alone, having an uncle (John Hawkes) who misses his brother and a best friend who grew up in the same bleak surroundings. But everyone around her is either threatening or terrified, or both. She starts by asking kinfolk if they have seen her father and is generally warned off from prying. Unfazed, she heads to the top of the backwoods food chain to the granddaddy who runs the clan and its illegal activities. This proves to be both a good and bad idea: good, because it eventually leads to the truth and a way out of her predicament; bad, because the danger of retribution becomes a reality for her and anyone who helps her. (While the movie is rated R, it focuses on the ominous atmosphere and leaves offensive images to the viewer's imagination. In one instance this is more than enough to induce flinching.) The deeper Ree goes the more we understand how her world works — an enlightening experience from a safe distance — and the more we admire how she defies this world while retaining her composure and compassion. One cannot know how she will fare after her quest ends, but there is little doubt that if some path leads to greater security for her family, she will find it.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.