By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Winter’s Bone (2010), originally reviewed in my blog Draupadiarjun on February 25, 2011
The Death of Sweet Mister (2001) was a haunting book about love and betrayal by Daniel Woodrell, that stays with you like the fruit of the Knowledge Tree, the way Lolita stays with you. Winter’s Bone, which Woodrell published in 2006, was very different – after the sledgehammer impact of Sweet Mister, I’d say a softer, looking at events and emotions that war less against what is considered natural.
It was a happy day for Woodrell’s readers when Debra Granik’s movie version of Winter’s Bone was released last year. It won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture (Drama) at the Sundance Film Festival, 2010. Now there is renewed interest in Woodrell’s work, let’s hope not just as a pre-Oscar talking point.
It’s one of those coincidences that three young actors feature in crucial roles in three movies getting a look-in at the 2011 Oscars. Hailee Steinfeld, who plays Mattie in True Grit (2010), is fourteen. James Frecheville was seventeen during the making of Animal Kingdom, and Jennifer Lawrence, nineteen years old in February-March 2009, when Winter’s Bone was filmed. All three movies also dwell on the way the unexpected loss of a parent changes a youngster. He or she must take on responsibilities and make sacrifices.
A “frugal film”, as director Granik call it, Winter’s Bone nevertheless manages to create the essential mood and setting of Woodrell’s book. To foreigners unfamiliar with pockets of American society where life’s as hard and unforgiving as it is in poverty-stalked areas elsewhere in the world that receive more media attention, this film will come as a shock. Almost as soon as the film begins you wonder what’s going on, are the children on their own in this bitter winter, with no food, money, help or protection? (Ree Dolly, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, is seventeen in the film, and has two young siblings.)
The family home has remnants of a sweeter life, there are Ashlee-Dawn’s toy ponies, Cupcake and Brownie, there’s the trampoline, there’s dad Jessup Dolly’s closet with his jackets and boots, there are the pebble chimes, there is mom Connie who, even in her mental sickness, seems bred differently from her kinswomen. However, Jessup’s missing for over a month, and money (and food) is running out.
Then swiftly, the nub of the story is revealed: Jessup has pledged their home, which is Connie’s ancestral home, and her timber acres as bail. He has a court date the following week. If he doesn’t show, the bondsman will take all and the family would be out in the fields in winter. Ree must find her dad, dead or alive, before the fraying threads that hold her dreams give for good.
Ree comes across in the film as a girl of action, which she is in the book, for sure. Woodrell also stressed her capacity to think deeply about her family’s future. She wants for her siblings more than a roof and timber acres. Woodrell writes:
“Ree’s grand hope was that the boys would not be dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean. So many Dolly kids were that way, ruined before they had chin hair, groomed to live outside square law and abide by the remorseless, blood-soaked commandments that governed lives led outside square law.”
(N.B. In the book, Ree’s siblings are both boys.)
Ree’s hope isn’t that different from one shared by around the world living in circumstances that destroy childhood. Ree’s world is southern Missouri, near the Arkansas border, in the Ozarks. Her dad and male kin make a living mainly from “cooking” methamphetamine. Everyone in this community is bound to a code of silence. You break the code, and the code breaks you. Ree doesn’t want this life for herself either. She’d rather join the Army and be part of “square law”. But no one will tell her where Jessup is, and it seems likely that she’ll never get out.
The responses to Ree’s questions range from hostility to brutality. We meet Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), Blond Milton (William White) Little Arthur (Kevin Breznahan), Merab ( Dale Dickey), Merab’s sisters, and her husband Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall). However, brought up never to be weak, and determined to do everything in her power to save her family, Ree doesn’t back off until on one terrible night she is given closure.
It's a primitive world of clans, vengeance and blood-laws, dark as Macbeth, a world in which people and their words and actions are like emblems from a nightmare. Of all the people, in the film, Ree, Teardrop and Ree’s friend Gail (Lauren Sweetser) were truest to the author’s vision. Hawke is outstanding as Teardrop, giving the film a big part of its dangerous, hallucinatory tone, much more than Thump. Dale Dickey, though not “burly”, is a superb Merab, shading her character perfectly. Jennifer Lawrence gives Ree a face and her mind. Her clear, commanding tones hold up for her siblings the belief that they are still safe as a family.
The film is big on atmosphere. We feel the chill of the place, the neighbor’s suspicions, and the conspiracy of silence on Jessup’s disappearance. The director says in her DVD commentary that she could not use half the wide shots of the woods – we are grateful for the three she kept! I do wonder if the film couldn’t have been edited more tightly to accommodate more of the wood shots, for they’d have given a clearer idea of what Ree does, the distances her old combat boots take her. They would have also expressed better the idea of waiting in all of nature to see past winter’s bones. I’d have liked to see more of Connie and less of the Army recruiter, ROTC, and scenes at the high school. If the purpose of the school scenes was to show that Ree misses school, it doesn’t come out that way. The poignancy of Ree’s Army dream is watered down by the recruiter scene. I also have a difficulty with Ree’s dream, shot on Super 8 film. It’s beautifully executed, but showing a wood full of squirrels immediately after the long scene in which Ree teaches the kids to skin the squirrels that they’ve just shot seems odd and insensitive.
Winter’s Bone was filmed in southern Missouri, and local musicians contribute both traditional and original songs to the soundtrack. We actually see Marideth Sisco performing a ballad of the region and hear bands like Dirt Road Delight and Blackberry Winter. ‘Hardscrabble Elegy’, written and performed by Dickon Hinchliffe, adds enormously to creating the Ree’s winter of emotional as well as physical grappling.
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