Debra Granik (2010)
Winter’s Bone is nothing if not consistent in its determined grimness – the title, the colour-drained landscapes photographed by Michael McDonough, even the director’s surname (this is her second feature – the first was called Down to the Bone). The film opens with a woman’s voice singing a lullaby, without accompaniment: in the first line of the song, the word ‘Missouri’ is pronounced ‘Misery’. The heroine’s first name is Ree – it’s as if her hard life has eroded a longer name (Marie?) to a single syllable. (This reminded me of the old man who used to sell the Evening Press on the streets of York: he’d called out the paper’s name so often over the years it had contracted to what sounded like ‘Ypres’.) Ree, only seventeen, is the one grown-up in a family living in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, part of a desperately poor community, who dwell in sparsely arranged clapboard shacks. Each house seems to have instead of a garden its own bit of scrapyard. The local economy is driven largely by the production and sale of crystal meth. Ree’s absent father is part of these criminal networks; her silent mother is mentally ill and domestically useless. Ree is a conscientious and caring daughter and parent to her younger brother and sister. She supervises them in household chores, she tests their spelling and arithmetic. She also educates them in what, in the circumstances of their lives, are more practically necessary skills, like skinning a squirrel and how to use a gun. At the start of the film, a sheriff arrives to tell Ree that her recidivist father has put up the family home as collateral and jumped bail: if he can’t be found and presented in court, his wife and children will be evicted. Winter’s Bone tells the story of Ree’s search for her father and the physically and psychologically harrowing experiences that search involves. The story is intrinsically shocking too because Ree’s quest is to preserve a way of life which most of the film’s audience will see as deeply unenviable.
I’m too shallow to get much out of Winter’s Bone but I think there are lots of people whose admiration for it is guilt-induced – who would be uneasy finding fault with, or admitting to be bored by, the movie because that would seem tantamount to dismissing the dire poverty of the characters’ lives. I don’t suggest that Debra Granik who, with Anne Rosellini, wrote the screenplay (adapted from a novel of the same name by Daniel Woodrell), is intentionally exploiting this tendency on the part of the audience but I think it largely explains the praise the film is getting. The story is compelling but there are narrative weaknesses which would be recognised as such if the setting were different. It’s not clear, for example, as Ree goes from one hostile, suspicious household to another in search of her father, how much ground she’s covering. We can see she’s hardy but is the lack of any physical effect on her because she’s not walking far or because the urgency of her mission shuts out fatigue? I never got clear either who Ree was and wasn’t related to, although blood ties seem to be an important theme of the story. Some of the plot synopsis in the paragraph above derives from watching the film and some from reading about it. I’m not good at following a complicated narrative but in this case I’m pretty sure that I struggled either because information about Winter’s Bone was contained in press handouts rather than conveyed on screen or because it’s so hard to work out what the characters are saying. Debra Granik seems to think that an actor speaking in anything other than a mumbling monotone would amount to a theatrical flamboyance inappropriate to the solemnity of the tale she’s telling. At one point, after Ree has been brutally attacked by women who are part of the ‘family’ of the most vicious of the local criminals (I learned afterwards his name is Thump), their ringleader – a harridan with the Biblical-sounding name of Merab – hisses, ‘You was warned – but you wouldn’t listen: why didn’t you listen?’ You almost expect Ree to answer, ‘Because I couldn’t hear what you said’.
As Ree, Jennifer Lawrence (only nineteen when she made the film) is the worst offender for swallowing her lines – although this may be because she has more lines than anyone else. Lawrence, who has a pretty, puffy face, plays the role with commitment, although I didn’t often find her greatly expressive. I did, though, like her desperate, past caring wit in the sequence after the women have attacked her and, when Thump asks what Ree thinks they’re going to do to her next, she says, ‘Kill me probably’ – then, when she’s told they won’t, ‘Help me then’. There’s a tendency for acting in a piece like this to be overrated because it’s glumly ‘real’ – but a tendency for someone like me to underrate it too, assuming that, because I don’t know the actors, they’re merely playing themselves and unlikely to be capable of doing more. About halfway through, I realised that the actor playing Ree’s drug-addicted uncle Teardrop (sic!), her father’s brother, had been the male lead in another Sundance hit of a few years back, Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). It’s not only because I’d seen and enjoyed John Hawkes in such a different role that I felt he gave the best performance in Winter’s Bone (I’d also seen Sheryl Lee, who doesn’t register that strongly here) but it’s certainly part of the explanation. Hawkes, who resembles a wasted, unhandsome Sam Shepard, gives Teardrop an unsettling complexity – a capacity to surprise, which is very distinctive in this film. There’s also a remarkable piece of acting from whoever plays Ree’s mother (I can’t work this out from IMDB details) that elevates the film’s conclusion: she expresses silently but beautifully how the pall hanging over the family has lifted.
In other respects, the happy ending – although welcome – is surprisingly conventional and sentimental. Teardrop brings two newborn chicks for Ree’s brother and sister to raise, and strums nostalgically on the banjo of his brother, whom we now know to be dead. (Once Ree is able to present the grisly evidence of her father’s death to the sheriff, the law is off the family’s backs.) Elsewhere, Granik includes scenes of local music-making which have a virtually documentary interest, as do the faces of the children playing Ree’s siblings (Isaiah Stone and Ashlee Thompson). The repeated images of these two on a little trampoline outside the house are effective because they fuse a sad symbolism about the limits of their lives with a sense of the children’s contentment with their simple play. Others in the cast who make a good impression are Dale Dickey as the hatchet-faced Merab, and three men playing officials: Garret Dillahunt as the sheriff, Tate Taylor as the bailbondsman, and Russell Schalk as an army recruiter. Schalk features in a strong sequence in which Ree tries to enlist – partly to find a new life, mainly to get the cash she desperately needs to save the family.
17 September 2010
