Bone lacks bumpkin bona fides
FILM REVIEW: WINTER'S BONE Reviewed by Adam Kamien Rating: 2.5/5 WINTER’S Bone, just the second feature film from writer/director Debra Granik, is a murder mystery set in the ungodly Ozark mountains in south-western Missouri.
FILM REVIEW: WINTER’S BONE
Reviewed by Adam Kamien
Rating: 2.5/5
WINTER’S Bone, just the second feature film from writer/director Debra Granik, is a murder mystery set in the ungodly Ozark mountains in south-western Missouri.
Adapted from the novel of the same name, Granik’s screenplay is part procedural, part character study, and relies on the presentimental beauty of the landscape for analogy and atmosphere.
Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is busy looking after her much younger brother and sister as well as a catatonic mother. Like the Ozarks, Ree is stoic and hardened, but beautiful. She is only just managing, and occasionally relies on neighbours for food and firewood.
Life in the Ozarks is desperate and harsh, and Ree defies the desolation and lives for her family. But all that is threatened when the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) turns up on her doorstep to tell her that her degenerate father Jessup has put up their house as bail on a charge of cooking meth. He explains that if he doesn’t turn up for his court date the house will be seized.
Ree has no option but to find her father, dead or alive, and starts quizzing the local low-lifes, drug dealers, drug addicts and other malcontents her father mixes with.
She ends up at the top of the food chain, asking for answers from local crime boss Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall) and needs to be rescued by her uncle and drug addicted crim, Teardrop (John Hawkes).
At the start of the film, Ree tells her sibling to “never ask for what ought to be given”, but she is forced to do exactly this as she searches for answers. From there on, the film is full of menacing stares, and gatekeeper characters spouting hillbilly portents like: “That’s a real good way to end up bit by hogs, or wishin’ you was”.
Granik seems excited to drag us through this white trash backwater, replete with yokels in coveralls, dilapidated barns and malnourished livestock feeding on overgrown scrub engulfing abandoned cars.
However, she doesn’t do a particularly good job of capturing it, and any windswept isolation or foreboding that the scenery does impart is diluted by poorly fleshed out characters and overwrought dialogue delivered with forced southern drawls.
In a film like Winter’s Bone, where the environment is leaned on so heavily to drive the narrative, authenticity is everything, and it is sorely lacking.
Granik tries to shock with tidbits of everyday life in the Ozarks. We see Ree teach her six-year-old brother about guns, and how to gut a squirrel for dinner, but because the siblings are more narrative devices than characters, it just isn’t as perturbing as it should be.
The same can be said for most of Granik’s hill folk, who are monotonal in type and portrayal. They are all taciturn, violent and sinister, and at times, hard to discern from one another.
The murder mystery element falls short too, with the traditional contrivances, like the uncovering of clues and revelatory discoveries, abandoned in favour of a census-style door-knock.
Even the photography is a let down, which is remarkable given the inherent majesty of the scenery, with cinematographer Michael McDonough (New York, I Love You) doing little to capture its vastness. Instead, the obligatory colour palate of greys and washed-out blue are used to convey the bitter cold and biting wind.
Lawrence does her best to turn in a restrained, nuanced performance, but aside from two affecting moments, little insight is offered into her character, beyond true grit.
Winter’s Bone is in limited release nationally.
ADAM KAMIEN
comments