When considering a film, book, or play one of the strongest selling points for me is the unfamiliar. Are we going somewhere new? Have we met characters like this before, or do the situations or themes feel recycled? By these standards Debra Granik's Winter's Bone must be counted a huge success, and the Sundance prize-winner doesn't have serious competition to date as my choice for the best film of 2010. Winter's Bone doesn't open our horizons so much as make us look over our shoulder or cause us to slow down a little next time we pass a turnoff that leads to a neighborhood we don't frequent. Setting a film inside a closed society, a world with its own largely unspoken customs and strictures, is no light work; just ask most of the directors who have made Middle East-set movies in the last decade. Winter's Bone takes the audience to a deeply scary place that's also unsettlingly close to home.
Ree Dolly, played by an exceptional Jennifer Lawrence, is a 17-year old charged with the care of her two younger siblings and mentally ravaged mother on the family's small property in the Missouri Ozarks. Ree's world is one of deep woods and dirt roads, there's almost no modernity in the film other than brief scenes at a high school and a livestock auction. Ree's father Jessup is notoriously involved in the production of meth, which is the secret economy that gives many of Ree's neighbors and relatives some small standard of living. When Ree is visited by a cop (Garret Dillahunt) and told that Jessup has put his family's house up as bond after an arrest, her choices are clear. If Ree can't find her father and make him show up for trial in a few days, the family will lose its home. Ree's only ally is her uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), who is seething at the prospect of what may have happened to his brother but is just as caught up in the game. Ree's journey is a series of encounters in which she is told with increasing violence to give up. Chief among her antagonists is Merab (Dale Dickey), wife of the local kingpin and leader of a gang of frightening women who will brook no threat to their way of life.
In a late scene Ree tells Dillahunt's cop that she doesn't talk about the activities of men, and who can blame her? The options for Ree are all too clear: she can become subsumed by the culture of drugs and secrecy like Merab or fight the small fights to ensure a future for her family. Ree furiously teaches her brother and sister what she can about survival, from the preparation of squirrel to how to shoot a gun. Ree harbors dreams of joining the army but her responsibilities weigh her down; perhaps the scariest thing about Winter's Bone isn't the resolution to the mystery of what's become of Jessup but the way that Ree is forced to accept it. Jennifer Lawrence gives a searing breakout performance as Ree. Neither Lawrence nor the rest of the cast (Hawkes is also superb) makes the mistake of playing these characters as hicks. Look past the accents and the music; it takes plenty of innate intelligence to survive in Ree's world and dreaming of something more is the harder choice. Winter's Bone feels grounded in its setting "bread and butter," to steal Ree's phrase. It's an classic American story of dreams, hard work, and doing what it takes, but it's all the more important for offering no assurances that those things will matter at all.
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