Desperation in the highlands

WINTER'S BONE, set amidst the crystal meth labs that dot Missouri's mountain country, is a sort of rural film noir. The story spans miles of bleak Ozarks backwoods and unfolds without a hurry, and yet is packed with suspense. The film--one-half social realism, one-half detective mystery--demands the viewer's attention from opening to closing credits.

The story follows Ree Dolly, an uncomplaining 17-year-old raising her two younger siblings and caring for her catatonic mother. Her absent father, Jessup, cooks meth and, as we learn through a visit from the local sheriff, has posted as bail bond the family's home and the timberland where they hunt squirrels.

He's due to appear in court in a week, but he's nowhere to be found. If he doesn't appear, the family will be turned out, left to live "in the fields like dogs."

Determined to track her father down, Ree walks acre by acre to the homes of relatives she hopes might have some information. As she travels, she is met with offers of drugs, threats of violence, and admonitions to quit asking questions. No one offers any gesture of regret for her situation. Her Uncle Teardrop warns her after only a few moments of pleading for help, "I already told you to shut up once, with my mouth."

As Roger Ebert points out, "There is a hazard of caricature here. [Director Debra] Granik avoids it. Her film doesn't live above these people, but among them." Outstanding performances, especially by Jennifer Lawrence (Ree) and John Hawkes (Teardrop) allow each character to come across with authenticity and depth.

The film's producers worked with a guide who helped find local residents to participate in every aspect of the filmmaking, from sets to acting to music to script writing. The character of six-year-old Ashlee is given life by a little girl who actually lives in one of the houses where the film is shot.

Combined with the barren, leafless terrain, sparse dialogue and storytelling that prefers to show rather than tell, the participation of local residents allows the film to arrive on screen with a sense of place convincing enough to give summer audiences the full chill of the Missouri winter.

No character in the film is flat. The wonderfully complex Teardrop emerges halfway through the film as Ree's most self-sacrificing ally. Even Jessup, who never appears on screen, isn't simply a villain. While his disappearance forces Ree to face down terrifying danger, it's also clear she loves and misses him.

As she becomes increasingly concerned about where her father may be, her continuing courage stands in stark contrast to the life's role she's expected to play. Though the women in the film are certainly not portrayed as meek, they clearly occupy a second-class citizenship in their Ozark-maroon culture. In part, the cold responses Ree receives are a rebuke for having the audacity as a woman to demand the men of her community pay her any attention.

In one scene, she visits a friend named Gail who looks about Ree's age but has an infant and a husband. Ree gets Gail to ask her husband for the use of his truck to help in her search. When Gail's husband says no without any room for argument, she tells Ree she can't press him any further because, "It's different when you're married." "It must be real different," Ree replies, "'cause you never used to take any shit."

IN ELLA Taylor's review in the New York Times, Granik describes how she and collaborator Anne Rosellini were moved to write the screenplay, based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, because of the strength of Ree's character:

We had just come off a long year of reading scripts in which each female protagonist was more ill and rickety and pathetic and pathologically devastated than the last. It went from cutting to sexual abuse to all forms of injuries. There was even a remake of The Snake Pit. That's not to say we were looking for a perfect female protagonist. But Ree shone out as someone whose competence and tenacity and unpredictable responses we enjoyed.

A contradictory mixture of solidarity and violence guides most of the characters' interactions. They are a community of survivors, spread out over acres of space, where everyone is a distant cousin, but no one has much to spare. They collectively refer to the sheriff as "the law," an unwelcome outsider in a society that revolves entirely around drugs.

The same women who beat Ree bloody wake her afterward apologizing for how badly she's hurt and ask, "What are we going to do with you?" "Kill me, I guess," Ree suggests. "That idea's been said already," they say. "Help me then. That idea been said yet?" And eventually, they do.

Perhaps the most tense relationships exist between Ree and the couple who live next door--their nearest neighbors by far--on whom Ree depends to help keep food on the table. Watching them skin a freshly killed deer, Ree's little brother suggests she ask them to give them some of the meat. She responds sternly, "Never ask for what ought to be given." The couple's treatment of the Dollys as charity cases seems an unwelcome aberration from the more even-handed exchange we see between other equally struggling folks.

Another notable scene has Ree visit an army recruiter, hopeful that the signing bonus might help her keep her home. But Ree is only 17 and has no parent to approve her enlistment. The recruiter's response is no doubt intended to seem surprisingly gentle and understanding, but in fact is extremely patronizing.

He deflects her disappointment that the advertised bonus is not actually given at the time of signing by telling her the "real" courageous thing to do is to stay home and take care of her responsibility to raise her little brother and sister.

Ree is not drawn to army service as a source of adventure or even escape, and had she been able to enlist, she may have been deployed to patrol villages in Afghanistan as isolated and poverty-stricken as her own neck of the woods.

The scene nonetheless drives home the injustice of weighty responsibilities heaped on a person with few resources or choices in life. Her struggle makes Winter's Bone a haunting, resonant and extremely satisfying film.