Winter's Bone Review
By David Kempler
Chilled to the Bone
One of the big winners from the latest Cannes festival, "Winter's Bone", figured to be special, or at the very least, a fine cinematic experience. While it doesn't rise to the level of greatness, it is nevertheless a very good example of tensions boiling to the surface over and over again. Debra Granick's adaptation of the book is so stark that even though it is shot in color, it is almost without any colors at all. It is dank and dismal in its presentation, matching both the predicaments of its characters and the look of the Ozarks in Missouri.
Our primary victim is Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a teenage girl forced to into the role of head-of-the-house. Her father is a meth addict and is running from the law and from some of the local lowlifes, almost all of whom are kin in some way. Her mother suffers from a mental dysfunction that renders her silent and useless. Ree's two younger siblings can only watch from the sidelines, the boy old enough to hate what is going on, but powerless to do anything about it. Her younger sister senses something is amiss but she is content to bounce on the old trampoline in their backyard.
Everyone else in "Winter's Bone", if you lined them up and combined all of their personalities, could not come up with a single smiling face between them. All of their lives are filled with misery and resignation to their fate.
Even though the story is ostensibly about Ree trying to find her father in order to save their land, it's really about a young woman struggling to keep her family together, against all odds. When she turns to her relatives for help, we learn that blood is not always thicker than water. Everything is about people taking care of themselves so that they can survive to see another day, even if that day is hell on Earth.
By the time "Winter's Bone" reaches its grand finale, one unlikely man rises to the occasion to do the right thing, but it is impossible to call him a hero. He acts as if he feels he has no choice but to do so, not with so much as a hint of real gallantry. Everyone here is in their shared prison. The fact that a man can break through, even for only a short while, is somewhat reassuring, but it does not sway us into thinking that roses will eventually bloom and happiness shall reign over the land. The best we, or the people who live there can hope for, is a temporary respite. When the dust settles, all of the same problems will remain.
