8-12-10 Movie Review: Winter’s Bone

The only noncommercial movie showing I know of for the coming week is the League of Women Voters’ DVD of Eleanor Clift, a Newsweek White House reporter, talking at WSU back in 2005, showing Tuesday night at 6:30 in the Downtown Senior Center at 200 South Walnut, one block east of Seneca and one south of Douglas; enter through the parking lot in back.

But we do have an unusual independent movie, and a very good one, though hardly a heart warmer, in Winter’s Bone, a movie of the novel by Daniel Woodrell.

Newcomer, at least to me, Jennifer Lawrence plays a seventeen-year-old girl in the Ozarks of Missouri who is left with a dysfunctional mother and two younger siblings when her father, who was apparently never much use to begin with, disappears after apparently losing the family home. Her society is such that I am impressed by the fact that the Missouri Film Commission is credited with helping make the movie. But Winter’s Bone won the dramatic grand jury prize and a screenwriting award at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Wichita Eagle suggested that Lawrence get consideration for an Academy Award.

Don’t expect a lot of sentimentality about the great old American family. Nobody in Winter’s Bone has time or energy to spend on emotion, not even grief; life is a matter of survival, and it takes a long time to detect that there is any sentiment involved, or that there is anything we would regard as a moral code. When these things appear, they are not enough to make the characters attractive, maybe not even to make them sympathetic. But we do see why they maybe can’t be much different from what they are.

For one thing, while they do have refrigerators and running water and even a backyard trampoline, and their school seems fairly up to date, they are pretty much one a subsistence level in a geography of abandoned cars and rotting buildings suggestive of Tobacco Road or Dogpatch, and their only source of adequate income seems to be meth-amphetamine, which is so dangerous to make that at one time it is suggested that all meth-amphetamine laboratories are eventually destroyed by explosions. They can’t involve themselves with the law, which surprisingly does not seem to be corrupt, so they have to enforce their own rules, which are primarily devoted to keeping secrets.

But as we go along, we find that there are rules, some of them involving self-sacrifice and a notion of honor, even in some of the least attractive characters. There can hardly be a happy ending as long as our heroine is trapped in her home culture, but there is maybe a little tiny upbeat at the end. But physical casting is enough to counter it: check the faces of the females, from the youngest to the oldest, and you will see what this society does to women, steadily over the years.

There is mystery and suspense and real danger, and you have to admire our heroine for determination and devotion to her siblings, if to nothing else. She has learned not to indulge in emotions, which makes the role different, but Jennifer Lawrence is helped by screenwriters Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini and director Granik.

Winter’s Bone is a “little” independent movie of a type Hollywood is not interested in; you won’t get a chance at anything like it very soon, and it surely won’t be here long, maybe not tomorrow.