Winter’s Bone is a fabulous film that demonstrates once and for all that blood is thicker than crystal meth. Except when you’re a snitch. The neat, more or less airtight premise keeps this hillbilly stomp of a film tightly wound and tense.
The plot is so simple, it’s maddening. The setting is the Missouri Ozarks, which is apparently the Champagne Region for meth. Ree (a wonderfully stoic, no-nonsense Jennifer Lawrence) is a 17-year-old girl who, by virtue of not being a complete idiot, has become the head of her household. She’s been left to fend for herself, her two younger siblings, and a near-catatonic mother. To say Ree’s father is a lowdown deadbeat dad doesn’t do him justice. This crystal meth chef got himself in trouble with the law, put his house up for collateral for his bail, and promptly vanished. Ree is informed by the sheriff that if dear old Dad doesn’t show up in a week, her family’s home will be seized and her family be thrown out into the woods.
Ree must now enter the Heart of Darkness of the meth industry to track down her dad. She obviously doesn’t relish this quest, but it’s either risk her life or face dire poverty. The first monster she must confront is her father’s brother, Uncle Teardrop (played to greasy, frightening perfection by John Hawkes). He’s the sort of fella who tells his wife “I already told you to shut up once with my mouth.” Teardrop himself is a meth aficionado, and it’s clear he has no interest in helping Ree track down her father. Indeed, Ree gets stonewalled in every direction she goes, but she doggedly keeps following clues and narrowly getting herself killed a dozen times.
The ghost of Ree’s father pervades the film. We learn that he was a very careful cooker, so Ree doesn’t fall for the red herring that he died in a meth lab explosion. Ree eventually tries to gain an audience with Thump, the local meth kingpin, but he’s just as interested in helping out Ree as Teardrop. For the entire film, Ree faces stony silences, death threats, and finally gets a good ol’ Ozark ass-whuppin’. But try as you might to knock Ree down, she always gets back up.
And that’s the undeniable charm of the film. Ree is the pluckiest kid I’ve seen in a movie since that little boy faced down the ghost of Guillermo del Toro’s finest film, The Devil’s Backbone. Both Ree and that boy epitomize the stoical “Get ‘er done” spirit that I hold in high esteem and admiration. Throughout the film, the only thing that keeps Ree alive is that she’s kinfolk. She uses that distinction as a cop would a badge. It buys her time. It makes her adversaries pause. If nothing else, Winter’s Bone is a superb and very unusual police procedural.
There are really no good or bad guys in this film. Winter’s Bone is practically Miyazakian with its characters, who are both horrible and noble. The cinematography is top-notch, bringing out the forlorn beauty of the Ozarks woods and mountains, adorned by the detritus of our civilization, rusting cars and scattered plastic junk among the leaves of grass. Love among the ruins, indeed. My favorite scene involved Ree trying to chase down the mysterious ogre Thump through a surreal padlock of bellowing cows and strange, metal grate walkways that almost seemed cyberpunk.
The music is what you’d expect, a far grittier rendition of the score to O Brother Where Art Thou mainly because this flick ain’t no George Clooney goof-off. This here’s the real deal. And the ending, which would be criminal of me to give away, is so bang-on and gut punching that I actually exclaimed “Goddamn, boy!” without a trace of irony. All I gotta say is I’m sure glad my daddy weren’t no meth cooker.
