Award-winning art-house thriller Winter’s Bone has snuck so stealthily into SA’s art-house cinemas that it is likely to disappear just as quietly after a week or two on circuit. That would be a pity since it’s a welcome antidote to the special effects-laden festive season fare that has dominated SA screens for the past few weeks.
Based on a “country noir” novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone is a work of elemental power that burns with a quiet intensity for its entire 100-minute running time. Winter’s Bone is about the dark odyssey that Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence, pictured above), an impoverished 17-year-old in Missouri, embarks on to find her missing father.
It’s a film that signals the arrival of two major new talents in the form of Lawrence and director Debra Granik. At the centre of the film is Lawrence’s understated performance as the headstrong Ree, a young woman who navigates the treacherous terrain of the Missouri backwoods with only her own moral compass to guide her. With this role under her belt and a part in the upcoming X-Men: First Class, Lawrence is a star in the making.
Her gaze as steely as Clint Eastwood’s, Ree is no clichéd plucky teenager. She’s an unsmiling stoic who grimly shoulders the burden of raising two young siblings abandoned by a mother who has taken leave of her senses and a meth-cooking jailbird father. Her urgent drive her isn’t a need to uncover the truth, but the danger of losing the family home her father used to secure his bail bond.
Winter’s Bone is sensitively directed by Granik, whose only other feature directing credit is for the festival circuit hit Down to the Bone. Filmed in the Ozarks where the story plays out, and featuring many local actors in supporting roles, Winter’s Bone evokes a strong sense of place. The sparse, naturalistic camerawork captures a ghostly world in the grip of a harsh winter.
The film’s desolate, winter-blasted Missouri wilderness seems to exist in a time and location severed permanently from the rest of contemporary America. Populated by an isolated community of hard-featured people who all seem related by blood and by marriage, it’s a shattered landscape of overgrown weeds, burnt-out car shells, and crudely built shacks.
The film’s treatment of its destitute characters is neither sentimental nor condescending, despite the fact that directors handling this sort of subject matter can easily open themselves up to accusations of making poverty porn. Granik teases out the fears that drive her outlaw characters to make more of them than the one-dimensional parochial roughnecks we’ve seen in many films about America’s rural poor.
Severe, suspicious and violent as many of them are, they’re also bound by a peculiar backwoods code of honour and are capable of displaying occasional flashes of charity and compassion. The layers that John Hawkes reveals beneath the abrasive demeanour of Ree’s uncle, Teardrop, form just one of the many superb supporting roles in the film.
Winter’s Bone trailer (via YouTube):
Winter’s Bone demands some measure of patience from the viewer. There’s suspense but it is as much an ethnographic study and a drama about the fragility of blood ties as it as a thriller.
The film unpacks the mystery at its heart at a leisurely pace. It meanders for a while in its middle and there are place where it settles into a repetitive rhythm. But viewers that stick with it right until its end will be rewarded by a haunting denouement. — Lance Harris, TechCentral
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