WinterÃ’s Bone
Rated: R
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt
Director: Debra Granik
WorkNameSort: WinterÃ’s Bone
Our Rating: 3.00

A western and a fairy tale, Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Odyssey, writer-director Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a campfire tale of the utmost archetypal order for better, worse and mostly somewhere in between. 

The story is simple, in keeping with its ancient roots: The phenomenal young actress Jennifer Lawrence plays Ree, an ox of a teenager charged with caring for her younger brother and sister and a mentally ill mother. Her absent father appears to have been a petty criminal who’s now gone missing. One day, Ree gets word that her father missed a court date, and if she can’t locate him ‘ dead or alive ‘ she will lose her house and everything they own. This objective sets Ree on a quest that, yes, rings of Greek, but also, strangely, calls to mind the fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon:

So when she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and wept til she was weary, she set out on her way, and thus she walked for many and many a long day until at last she came to a great mountain.

And, for the first hour or so, that’s what Ree does. She walks from house to house, encountering increasingly hostile creatures and asks about her father’s whereabouts. Ree’s ‘great mountainâ?� is all around her; an inescapably dreary, impoverished Ozarkian countryside where food must be skinned, guns must come second nature and the women live in fear of their meth-addled men. Granik’s painstaking verisimilitude in these passages is commendable, but the film itself begins taking on an air of poverty pageantry, an escalating parade of expositional monsters bearing monologues and deep scars. 

As Ree runs out of options ‘ the seemingly inevitable sit-down with a military recruiter is one of Granik’s tender surprises ‘ so does the film, and unfortunately Granik’s answer is to ratchet up the violence to near-Fargo levels. When it comes to light that the townsfolk probably dealt with Ree’s problematic father their own way, the revelation comes in the form of brutal hellfire and visceral, immediate danger during a bloody centerpiece scene. My first reaction to that turning point during my initial viewing at the Florida Film Festival earlier this year was one of worry ‘ Lawrence’s best feature is a face that inspires paternalistic instincts. Upon second viewing, however, I was struck by how it’s completely unmotivated in terms of the characters’ actions. It simply makes no sense: The antagonists involved punish Ree for apparently getting too close to a secret she couldn’t ever know or have a chance at discovering, and later they cower in the presence of a hero they have no business being afraid of. 

It may seem like nitpicking, but considering how little action is involved in the otherwise proudly quiet Winter’s Bone, this scene is symptomatic of a larger narrative problem that completely derails by the climax, leaving in its wake an admirable, if episodic, first half, a ludicrous second, and anchoring it all ‘ and here’s where a point-blank ‘yes or noâ?� opinion is a fool’s errand for this film ‘ a main character (Ree), supported by an astoundingly organic actor (Lawrence) worth standing up and applauding. Ree is everything the overall film is not: true, righteous and captivating. 

This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2010.