Winter's Bone (15.)
Directed by Debra Granik.
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Lauren Sweetser, Sheryl Lee. 100 mins
Winter’s Bone is a novelty – an American movie about unglamorous poverty. Hollywood occasionally tackles the less well off but usually finds some angle of urban spectacle to showcase it in. Winter’s Bone is set amongst the mobile homes and shacks of Missouri’s rural poor, the people we’d once call hillbillies. It’s a world so grim that even when it isn’t actually raining there seems to be a coating of grim murky drizzle over everything.
Back in the happy go lucky days of the Dukes of Hazard they’d all be cheerfully running moonshine past the law. Now the industry is Crank, a form of crystal meths.
17 year old Ree (Lawrence) is trying to get along raising her two siblings as her mother is virtually catatonic and her father has disappeared, wanted by the police. Things are tough and then one day the local sheriff sidles up to the house and tells her that her father has put up the house and all the property as bail and if he doesn’t show up at court they’ll lose everything.
She must find out where he is or what has happened to him. But this is not a community that welcomes people asking questions, even though she is related to most of them.
The community is fascinating. Like vampires, it seems that they are unable to enter another person’s home unless they have been invited in. The women seem to be in fear of the arbitrary and wild rages of the menfolk yet in many ways it is entirely matriarchal.
This may make it all sound very slice of life but movie generates in own distinctive mood of low key compelling. Without being a thriller in the conventional sense or breaking the sense of realism it draws you into Rees story. It grips without jerking you around.
The acting is tremendous all round though Lawrence’s strong and resourceful Ree is an obvious standout. Such are the tricks of birth – if she be born a few hundred miles away you can just imagine her being the lead in a light Cheerleader comedy. Everybody is so convincing that it feels like a little betrayal to look them up on IMDB and see them scrubbed up and beaming out big white pearly smiles on some red carpet.
Directed by Debra Granik.
Starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Lauren Sweetser, Sheryl Lee. 100 mins
Winter’s Bone is a novelty – an American movie about unglamorous poverty. Hollywood occasionally tackles the less well off but usually finds some angle of urban spectacle to showcase it in. Winter’s Bone is set amongst the mobile homes and shacks of Missouri’s rural poor, the people we’d once call hillbillies. It’s a world so grim that even when it isn’t actually raining there seems to be a coating of grim murky drizzle over everything.
Back in the happy go lucky days of the Dukes of Hazard they’d all be cheerfully running moonshine past the law. Now the industry is Crank, a form of crystal meths.
17 year old Ree (Lawrence) is trying to get along raising her two siblings as her mother is virtually catatonic and her father has disappeared, wanted by the police. Things are tough and then one day the local sheriff sidles up to the house and tells her that her father has put up the house and all the property as bail and if he doesn’t show up at court they’ll lose everything.
She must find out where he is or what has happened to him. But this is not a community that welcomes people asking questions, even though she is related to most of them.
The community is fascinating. Like vampires, it seems that they are unable to enter another person’s home unless they have been invited in. The women seem to be in fear of the arbitrary and wild rages of the menfolk yet in many ways it is entirely matriarchal.
This may make it all sound very slice of life but movie generates in own distinctive mood of low key compelling. Without being a thriller in the conventional sense or breaking the sense of realism it draws you into Rees story. It grips without jerking you around.
The acting is tremendous all round though Lawrence’s strong and resourceful Ree is an obvious standout. Such are the tricks of birth – if she be born a few hundred miles away you can just imagine her being the lead in a light Cheerleader comedy. Everybody is so convincing that it feels like a little betrayal to look them up on IMDB and see them scrubbed up and beaming out big white pearly smiles on some red carpet.
