Broken Bone

Yo, Academy: Remember this face at Oscar time

It would be easy to chalk up Debra Granik’s new film, Winter’s Bone, as just another movie about poverty. It’s anything but. In fact, although it takes place in one of the most economically depressed parts of the nation, Winter’s Bone is really a cold, grim piece of noir, set in a community utterly unfamiliar to most Americans. It’s well-written and well-produced, and it features a performance from Jennifer Lawrence that’s both disturbing and refreshing, the sort of work that should spark consideration when awards season rolls around.

Lawrence is Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old Ozark girl. She and her much younger brother (Isaiah Stone) and sister (Ashlee Thompson) live in a squalid home with their mother, who’s had a complete mental collapse. They survive on squirrels and the kindness of their neighbors, gathering around the woodstove for warmth in the evenings. It ain’t pretty, and it’s about to get uglier. In the film’s opening moments, Sheriff Baskin (Garret Dillahunt) informs Ree that her father, Jessup, a known meth cooker, put the family home up as collateral for bail and then skipped out on his bond. She’s got one week to find him and force him to show up for his court date. If she can’t, they’ll lose the house.

Ree is a tough girl, but these are seriously desperate circumstances. As she starts asking around, everyone who knows anything about her dad tells her that her search could be hazardous to her health—including her own uncle, Teardrop (the criminally underrated character actor John Hawkes), a grimy, hard-bitten piece of work. But what’s a girl to do? There’s no safety net for her and the rest of the family without their home. She has no choice but to forge onward, even as her investigations lead her toward a family of criminals who play for keeps. This is a world in which everyone has their fingers in small-time criminal endeavors because it’s the only way to survive. It’s no secret that Ree’s dad makes meth, because there’s no shame in it within this community. Her search, however, brands her as a troublemaker among a group of people not looking for attention.

Ree is smart, and she’s spent her entire life struggling to stay afloat. She’s flinty, sure, but she’s also only 17 years old, and Granik and Lawrence work hard to make it clear that she doesn’t necessarily have the tools needed to overcome a bleak circumstance. Lawrence’s performance is a terrific blend of bristle and gristle that masks the desperate vulnerability of a child who’s never been able to depend on her own parents, or any adults, for emotional or financial support. She stands up to everyone and anyone, but that also means that she sometimes mouths off to people she shouldn’t. And there are real-life complexities she simply isn’t mature enough to grasp. But as the box around her tightens, she finds herself with fewer and fewer options—even joining the military, a choice many of her peers make to pullthemselves out of poverty, is out of the question.

The world Granik’s characters inhabit is pure American detritus, made up of poor people who live off the radar and off the grid. Hawkes and Dillahunt, who cut their teeth on Deadwood, help give the film a sense of reality, especially Hawkes, whose Teardrop is a man struggling with his attachment to family and his sense of the code by which he lives. He is not a nice man or a good person, and he doesn’t want to tangle with forces bigger than himself, but as he sees the mess Ree gets herself into, he reluctantly intervenes, eventually leading her to a solution that’s unpleasant at best.

There’s a lot that’s unsavory in Winter’s Bone, but it’s still one of the best films of the year to date.

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