"WINTER'S BONE" IN SUMMER

Winter Bone Many of us have a group of movie critics, if not one specifically, upon whom we rely to classify for us what comes down the pipeline. I like to read David Denby, cross-reference him with Dana Stevens, divide the result by Alex Carnevale and add a pinch of David Edelstein. In this way I arrive at a fairly bulletproof decision about whether I ought to lay down $13 (the cost of a ticket in this city) for two hours in front of the big screen. The procedure hasn't failed me yet.

It was with bewilderment, then, that I approached "Winter's Bone", an adaptation of the Daniel Woodrell novel by filmmaker Debra Granik. Clearly the film was a good one: it took home the grand jury prize at Sundance and has received uniformly excellent reviews. But the reviews are curious; many seem to be written in tones uncharacteristic of the reviewers. Denby and Edelstein write of the film with a kind of understated awe, as though they'd recorded their thoughts during the hushed silence directly following a screening. Denby proclaimed it "something new in movies: a 'country-noir' thriller" and "one of the great feminist works in film."

Edelstein found it to be "an odyssey, mythic in its intensity" and leading to "the purest catharsis imaginable." Since Carnevale and Stevens had yet to cover the film, I turned to A.O. Scott in the New York Times, who, with similar reverence, calls the film "almost Greek in its archaic power". To top it all off, Entertainment Weekly describes “Winter’s Bone” as "one of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see." Such language, if it appears at all, is usually studded with qualifiers. Not so in these reviews.

Taking place in the Ozarks of Missouri, “Winter’s Bone” follows 17-year-old Ree Dolly (played by Jennifer Lawrence) from neighbour to neighbour as she searches for her methamphetamine-cooking father, who has jumped bail and left the family house as bond. If Ree fails to find the Dolly patriarch—or prove that he’s dead—she, her younger siblings and her sick mother will lose their home. Trotting through cow fields and burnt-out trailers, Ree covers a gothic landscape mined with all the signs of meth production: smoke pumping from basements, junked cars, paranoid faces crumpling in on themselves. She’s the moral center in a tale that decimates the romantic myth of small-town America, roving instead through a hinterland of neglect and poverty that, to the credit of the writer and filmmakers, moves quickly beyond novelty into terror.

“Winter’s Bone” is startling but it’s not a trial to sit through, and this, perhaps, is the film’s biggest surprise. There humour, beauty and hope from unexpected angles. Reading back over the reviews, I can see why they puzzled me. There’s a puzzled quality to the tone of the writing itself, as though the reviewers are circling their target without being quite sure how to nail it. In this case, that confusion furnishes its own recommendation of the film: it is never easy to describe the arrival of something truly new.

~ MOLLY YOUNG

Picture Credit: Robb North (via Flickr)