Review: Winter's Bone

There are some films where the evocation of place and time is stronger than the story. Thats the case with Winters Bone, this years winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Director Debra Granik's bleak drama is about a teenage girl's search for her fugitive father.

Director Debra Graniks bleak drama, based on Daniel Woodrells highly praised 2006 novel, is about a teenage girls search for her fugitive father. But far more powerful than its murky plot is the movies recreation of life in the modern-day Ozarks an impoverished, colour-drained world of hard-faced women and haggard, wiry men, where moonshine and illegal stills have been replaced by cocaine and meth labs.

Jessup Dolly ran one of those labs and hes wanted both by the law and by his family. When his oldest daughter, 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), learns that her missing pa put up their log house and acreage as his bail bond against a forthcoming court appearance, she tenaciously sets out to track him down.

Ree really has no choice. With a catatonic mother and two younger siblings to care for as well as winter coming on she cant afford to lose the family home. But it means that she has to prise the truth about Jessups whereabouts from a closed community where blood ties go hand in hand with old grievances and codes of silence. Granik gives us one of the grimmest pictures of American rural rot since Sam Shepards Buried Child.

Ree is stonewalled, misled and threatened at every turn, even by her own kin. Finally, her cokehead uncle, Teardrop (a gaunt, forbidding John Hawkes), relents and helps her discover the fate of her father. It means going up against the areas drug lord, Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall), a kind of hillbilly godfather, and his brutal wife, Merab (Dale Dickey), who serves as his gatekeeper. Strong women abound in this secretive society, even though they remain under the thumb of their no-account menfolk.

Winters Bone shares themes, plot points (drug addiction, a bitter winter) and even part of its title with Graniks previous film, 2004s Down to the Bone. Whereas that stark tale was an acting showcase for the superb Vera Farmiga, this one spotlights newcomer Lawrence. The 19-year-old Kentucky actress, her feline face framed by flyaway hair, delivers a tough, intelligent performance that begs inevitable comparisons with last years Sundance debutante, Gabourey Sidibe of Precious.

Both play poor but resilient young women, but the similarities end there. Unlike Sidibes bullied teenager, Lawrences Ree doesnt need to acquire self-confidence she has a spine of steel from the outset. It may be bred in the bone "bread and buttered," as Ree puts it colloquially or a function of her harsh environment, but this scrappy child of the Ozarks has a survivors instincts. She prepares the younger Dollys for a hungry winter by teaching them to shoot, skin and gut squirrels, displaying the kind of cool pragmatism you dont usually associate with 17-year-old girls. If she harbours any adolescent dreams, its to join the army. In one of her few moments of abstraction, she slips into the local high school gym to watch the Junior ROTC go through their drills.

Not all of Winters Bone is dark. Theres a warm episode in which Ree, looking for her fathers ex-lover, comes upon a birthday party where a lively roots-music jam is in progress. It reminds you of the classic Dueling Banjos interlude in Deliverance, only here were transported by the wistful singing of Ozarks folklorist Marideth Sisco. Then there are the scenes with Rees married school friend Gail, a.k.a. Sweet Pea (Lauren Sweetser), who isnt afraid to defy her loutish husband. She offers a glimmer of hope that the next generation of mountain women wont defer to their men.

Still, the overriding mood is wintery. The picture was actually filmed in the Missouri part of the Ozarks and cinematographer Michael McDonough, who also shot Down to the Bone, lingers on landscapes of leafless trees, dead grass and yards littered with rusted machinery. At times, this barren world doesnt seem that far removed from the post-apocalyptic U.S. of The Road. (Strengthening the impression is the fact that Garret Dillahunt, who played one of the scary characters in that picture, appears here as an ambivalent sheriff.)

It feels odd to mention Avatar when reviewing a film like Winters Bone, but I was reminded of how, when James Camerons 3-D fantasy premiered, there were viewers who claimed to be depressed because they wanted to live on the fairy-tale planet of Pandora. Conversely, you leave this movie relieved that you dont dwell in its grey, sick world. But you suspect that, despite some grotesque touches, it isn't purely fiction. Blowing through Graniks vision of an insular, drug-ravaged American backwoods is the bone-chilling wind of truth.

Winters Bone opens in Toronto on June 18 and in Montreal and Vancouver on June 25.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.