Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) will either find her fugitive father or die trying. And that's her fear.
Her insistence that someone must know the whereabouts of her daddy, a crystal-meth cooker who put their Ozarks house up for his bail bond and then disappeared, could get her killed.
But unless she finds him, she, her 12-year-old brother, 6-year-old sister and their mentally ill mother will be booted out of their modest home and off their land.
- Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes.
- Rating: R for some drug material, language and violent content.
In "Winter's Bone," Ree is parent, protectress and victim of the scourge of methamphetamine, or crank, gnawing a poisonous path through Missouri. Drug addiction comes with a rural accent in this adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel.
Ree has a hardscrabble life with its own set of survival skills and beliefs such as "Never ask for what oughta be offered."
When her brother is squeamish about a freshly shot squirrel destined for a stew, she matter-of-factly orders, "Get in there and get them guts out. Sonny, there's a bunch of stuff that you're gonna have to get over being scared of."
The teen, whose plans to join the U.S. Army have been put on hold, must steel herself against threats, physical violence and offers of drugs ("You get the taste for it yet?" a man asks) as she tries to pry information out of relatives and neighbors.
This is no easy task, with no car to call her own, three people and various animals to care for, wood to split, meals to prepare, clothes to launder and hang on the line, and the very real possibility that she may never find her father or could go missing herself.
"Winter's Bone," directed and co-written by Debra Granik, won the grand jury prize for drama at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It's easy to see why, given its air of authenticity and no-nonsense look at a girl caught between the law and her extended family, each with its codes of silence, ironclad rules and punishment for breaking them.
Ms. Lawrence, looking like a younger Renee Zellweger before she became whippet thin, takes to this emotional, physical and social terrain as if she were the genuine article.
A Kentucky native, she played Kim Basinger's daughter and the de facto mother of her siblings in "The Burning Plain." That character, an impulsive adolescent, was driven by resentment at never having the chance to be a teenager.
Here, too, she is forced to be an adult and girds herself with determination and ferocity. When a woman asks her, "Ain't you got no men could do this?" she answers matter of factly, "No ma'am, I don't."
Her search takes her to kin, especially her father's brother nicknamed Teardrop (a wonderfully intense John Hawkes), along with a friend (Lauren Sweetser) who now is married and the mother of a baby, her father's onetime mistress (Sheryl Lee from "Twin Peaks") and a menacing kingpin who makes friends and foes quake.
This is a world where a girl could be beaten just like a man, children have to make their own entertainment, adults naturally incorporate music into their lives and people live off and close to the land.
Ms. Granik and Anne Rosellini adapted Mr. Woodrell's 193-page novel and whittled away at some of the back stories and changed a few details.
In the book, for instance, Ree has two brothers instead of a brother and sister (played by the untrained Ashlee Thompson, who really lives in the Dolly house and seems oblivious to the camera), and readers get a closer look at the claustrophobic compromises of marriage and why a neighbor would offer to take Sonny and raise him. In that regard, the movie is slightly confusing; it's a little hard at first to map the family and friend tree.
The addition of a livestock auction, however, enhances the atmosphere and ratchets up the tension of Ree, literally and figuratively struggling to make her voice heard. The search for her dad ends in pulse-pounding emotion.
Although Ms. Granik weighed shooting in upstate New York, remote areas of Pennsylvania and other locations, she ended up in her first choice of Southern Missouri. It helps the story vibrate with realism, but its main strength is its cast.
You feel as if you've been dropped into this world, so familiar and unfamiliar, and when Ree declares, "I'm a Dolly bred'n buttered," you never doubt her for a moment.
Opens today at Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill and Destinta Bridgeville.
Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
