Winter’s Bone: Film Review

Winter’s Bone is one of those films that you rarely hear very much about (it’s admittedly and decidedly unglamorous) but wonder once you’ve actually seen it how such an injustice can be carried out against filmgoers. It is gritty and realistic and full of moments that are horrifyingly real and somehow dreamlike at the same time. It is also a film that is elevated above its individual elements by a performance from Jennifer Lawrence that cannot be applauded loudly enough. Her portrayal of Ree beautifies and complicates a movie that would otherwise feel dreary and simple.

Winter’s Bone is the story of a 17-year-old girl named Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) who finds herself set upon a mission: her father, Jessup Dolly, is a meth maker who finds himself caught up with a network of lawbreakers and makers in the Ozarks that bears an astounding resemblance to Colombian drug lords and the Taliban. Jessup goes missing but is wanted by the law, which wouldn’t be especially surprising except for the fact that he has put up the home where he resides with his wife and children as bond after skipping bail. Dolly’s mother has long since checked out mentally and can no longer function as a parent, leaving Dolly to raise her younger brother and sister. Dolly cannot bear the thought of her family losing their home: it is the one thing in their life that binds them together – to each other, to the land, and to whatever the future holds for them.

So Dolly must find her father, bring him to justice, and keep the house in family hands. The journey she goes on to find her father (or what may have become of him) brings her nearly to death on more than one occasion, as she must traverse not only a dangerous and desolate landscape, but she must take also take on the seedy and self-ruled ways of the men who run the world of drug making in the Missouri Ozarks. Anyone who dares to challenge their ways or unmask their secrets risks not only death, but expulsion from reality and memory. Ree, barely more than a child herself, risks both. If nothing else, we admire her for her sheer bravery that seems to come from having adulthood thrust upon her far earlier than is just.

There are many hyperboles one may apply to Lawrence’s emotionally naked performance: heroic, devastating, illuminating, and brilliant certainly come to mind. But more than anything, Lawrence creates a character whose circumstances eventually become secondary to the turmoil that lives inside her, not around her. Indeed, when all else about the film may be forgotten, it is her image that persists in the memory, so powerfully is she depicted. She isn’t merely the protagonist or the star of the film: she is the film.

In the end, Winter’s Bone is not a film about hardship, familial loyalty, or drug abuse and production in modern rural America. It is a visceral, mythic Greek tragedy, replete with a fatal journey that ends in self-realization and, more importantly, allows us to understand (fully and wholly) the trials and circumstances of another human being. And that, we are reminded, is what great cinema is all about.