The Ozark family-gothic thriller Winter’s Bone gets so many things right it feeds the soul of this grumpy moviegoer.
Director Debra Granik has pulled off a small miracle. Shooting on location in the hills of southwestern Missouri, she immerses us in a perilous world that drips with atmosphere and authenticity.
Jennifer Lawrence (in a star-making performance) plays Ree, a young woman who finds herself, at the age of seventeen, the head of her crumbling household. Her criminal father is absent, her mother has retreated into a quiet, impenetrable madness, and her younger brother and sister are now her responsibility. A crisis looms when a sheriff’s deputy (Garret Dillahunt) stops by to inform her that her crank-cooking dad put the house they’re living in up as collateral for his bond. He’s missing, and about to miss his court date.
Ree has no choice but to scour the hills for her loser father. The problem is, even though she’s at least somewhat related to half of the folks on the mountain, they do not seem much interested in helping her.
There are all sort of kinds dangerous people, but perhaps the most interesting type is a scared, stupid person with a gun. Unfortunately for Ree, that description pretty much fits all of the folks she has to try to bully into helping her find her father.
I mentioned that the movie gets important things right. Let’s list a few of them:
- Details, details, details. From the tattered towels on the clothesline outside the teetering shacks, to the threadbare animals and hungry dogs that seem to fill the screen, everything you see puts you into this poverty-stricken hillbilly world in which setting up a meth lab is what passes for a promising career opportunity.
- Drop-dead casting. Granik’s cast is full of professional actors, but oh, the faces! Talk about a ragtag crowd of characters who have been “rode hard and put up wet.” Each new household of cousins Bree encounters feels more authentic than the last.
- Smart script written for adults. One of the things I most admire about a movie is when it is realistic enough to leave important information out. Most movies don’t have the confidence to do that, so half of the dialog sounds like artificial exposition: “So do we expect father home soon from the manor house where he’s worked as a groom for the Earl lo these many years?” The characters in Winter’s Bone don’t talk as if they know we’re listening. The dialog is terse and spare, and many seemingly important facts are never cleared up or spelled out. That’s actually how life is, and it makes the impact of the movie’s story all the stronger.
It would be easy for a movie like this to descend into Dogpatch-esque caricature, but it never does. Though many scenes crackle with potential danger, Granik keeps us on edge while using remarkable restraint.
I have to point out two supporting performances. John Hawkes has long been one of my favorite actors, and he brings a flinty menace to his role as Teardrop, the brother of Ree’s missing father. Hawkes brings his trademark mercurial intensity to this key role.
I never watched “My Name is Earl, ” so I wasn’t familiar with Dale Dickey until today. I’m now going to seek her out, because she delivers a knockout, Supporting Actress Academy Award-worthy turn as Merab, a creepy cousin with good manners who nevertheless seems just as likely to stuff Ree into a trunk as to offer her a cup of coffee. My blood ran cold when she demanded of Bree in an early scene: “Ain’t you got any men can do this for you?” Her magnificent face looks like something out of a a Walker Evans photograph. Looks like I’m going to have to start taping “Sordid Lives.” My hat is off to you, Ms. Dickey.
Also worthy of high praise are Affonso Gonçalves’s tense editing, which gives the movie a mesmerizing sense of pace, and Michael McDonough’s cinematography, which captures the stark, icy beauty of Missouri’s Christian and Taney Counties.
I strongly encourage moviegoers who are weary of explosions and dopey plots to seek out this gorgeous, riveting movie.
