I'm a Dolly, bred and buttered

WINTER’S BONE (2010)

Cormac McCarthy’s stark “Outer Dark” was perhaps my first dreadful experience with the Appalachia-centric genre. The novel is brilliant and McCarthy’s structure is immaculate, but there’s something about cold, desolate settings like his that just unnerve me. It could tie in with my brief upbringing in the south; I was raised in Georgia for a couple of years, so when I read books like McCarthy’s and watch films like Deliverance – and now Debra Granik’s Winter's Bone – I can’t help but associate my childhood with such bleak surroundings. Of course, I’m not saying that all rural films that entail that “backwoods horror” element have zero redeeming factors – many, like Deliverance, are incomparable – but those factors prove difficult to appreciate, or even identify when the plot is engulfed by impoverished environments and gritty vernacular. This was my beef with Winter’s Bone. There are no saving graces outside the story’s wretched atmosphere and the film’s miserable disposition becomes taxing after the first thirty minutes or so. However, despite Granik’s Bone being dreary to a fault, you inevitably fall in love with Jennifer Lawrence’s steadfast portrayal of the film’s heroine.

When I first caught wind of Granik’s mystery thriller back during Sundance, it instantly became one of my most anticipated of the year. Films propelled by brave female protagonists usually do it for me because they’re a rarity these days, and Bone’s rousing story was enough to get me hyped. Hype is unfortunately what ruined my viewing experience, because throughout, I was eagerly awaiting the moments of “mounting tensions” and “raw poetry”, yet the tension was spent and the "poetry" was dry.

Granik’s vision is actually an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name that recounts seventeen-year-old Ree’s (Lawrence) desperate search for her fugitive father through the local criminal apparatus. With her father missing and her mother riddled with depression, Ree has been entitled with the demanding role of matriarch over the Dolly family, which also consists of her younger brother and sister. Matters are made worse after she discovers that her father – who’s infamous around town for his dealings in meth – has placed the family’s property up as a bail bond. Left with few options, Ree decides to track her father down, who presumably died while on the lam, in order to salvage her home and her family.

It becomes clear that Ree is an exceptionally strong-willed young woman, but as her burdens become too much to bare, she begins to find adulthood difficult to embrace. In one of the film’s many maudlin scenes, Ree consults with her mother – who’s practically mute – about the decisive steps she should take regarding the house and the pursuit of her father. She receives impassive silence in return, sheds a tear or two, and then burrows deeper into her own indecisiveness. It’s upsetting really, because right on the brink of overcoming these subdued personalities, the moment’s undercut by the next monotonous scene.

Overall, the film’s pretty – and I hate this word – bland, even fairly one-dimensional as far as character development goes. Lawrence’s performance is engaging, harrowing, etc., but we’re only shown one side of Ree; there aren’t any light shades to her temperament. It’s unfortunate – because I was really looking forward to this one – but the film lacks heart, and I can usually determine this simply from the dialogue, which in this film’s case, was written like lines in a drippy work of prose. The narrative is cold and misses out on a fluid, well-balanced structure that could have fostered a true masterwork, but luckily the ensemble’s quality performances and the film’s shocking conclusion aren’t completely impaired.

7.5/10