Winter's Bone (2010)

Wherever Ree Dolly goes, the message is the same: stop digging your nose around or you’re going to get hurt. But she persists. She has to. Though she has little to lose, she could lose much of what’s left if she doesn’t find her father.

So goes WINTER’S BONE, an Ozark noir centered on a teenager who embarks on a search for her deadbeat father when the town sheriff informs her that his failure to appear at an upcoming court date will result in the family losing its house. The dad, Jessup, it turns out, is wanted for manufacturing and dealing meth. He goes missing, leaving a wife and three kids in a ramshackle house he leveraged as bond before taking off. Mom is a pill-popper and likely in denial; she is virtually useless to the family. And so it falls to Ree, the oldest, to be the family caregiver and provider.

Ree is resilient and, though proud, knows when to accept the kindness of a neighbor who would feed her family’s starving horse or allow her to use a machine to chop firewood. But she’s not about to allow the family to be split up, so she ventures out to find her father in the hopes that she can save the house. On her journey through the low-income Ozark countryside, she is told that her father is dead more than once. Those who might know details refuse to say. Chief among them is her uncle, Teardrop, who is unwilling to help. Ree teaches her younger siblings to hunt and clean squirrels and tries to get through to her mother, all the while spending her free moments hoping to confirm whether or not her father is dead or alive. It’s not long before the bondsmen come, giving her a week to prove her father’s death or lose the house.

Her efforts to intensify her search are at her own peril, and what happens to Ree next is best left for viewers to discover for themselves, so I won’t spoil that by divulging too many plot points here. “There’s a bunch of stuff that you’re going to have to get over being scared of,” Ree says at one point to her little brother, and indeed she is living her words.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Ree in a breakthrough performance. Most of her career has been television work, but this film will likely change that. Her name already appears on most shortlists for a Best Actress nomination, and it’s hard not to agree with those predictions. Hers is a fierce but controlled performance, the kind where an audience can’t separate an actor from a character.

Director Debra Granik lays the impoverished Missouri countryside bare without reducing all of its inhabitants to pity-worthy inbreeds and idiots. She understands that to the poor, the house is everything, even when that house is collapsing. The residents might have low incomes and low levels of educational experience, but they have community. They play music. A few offer assistance, even when they themselves have little. Her camera scans the junkyard details of this rural life, where the little kids play on rusted trampolines or jump across large bales of hay to occupy their time and the insides of houses are low-lit warehouses of hoarded crap.

But ultimately, Granik’s tale is one of stepping up to the plate. You never know when you’ll be forced to take control of a situation that nothing prepared you for, and we admire Ree more than we pity her, which is saying something because there is plenty about her life to feel sorry for. Ree’s uncle Teardrop must also rise to unexpected challenges as he eventually decides to take ownership of the family and assist his niece in uncovering the truth, or at least as much truth as possible.

WINTER’S BONE plays out quietly for the most part, like a good short story with characters the audience gets a chance to know. The performances are raw and not flashy in the slightest. Audiences might be surprised, in fact, to figure out that Sheriff Baskin is played by Garret Dillahunt, a relative unknown who shot to notoriety right around the time of this film’s release as the wacky dad on the TV show “Raising Hope.” And if you look up the career of John Hawkes, you’ll find that the actor who plays Teardrop has about an extensive a resume as an actor can have short of being recognizable. But the film ultimately belongs to Lawrence, who manages to inject a story of hopeless desperation with a calming and driven presence. Her performance lacks the kind of climactic, overly-dramatic screaming and wailing scene that Hollywood storytellers would have required of an actress, which is a credit to the writer as much as the star.

Little films like this tend to fall through the cracks without award recognition, and WINTER’S BONE will hopefully benefit from its Sundance Grand Jury Prize and, with any luck, some Oscar recognition. But even if it doesn’t, it’s not to be missed.

4 out of 4