A Review of Debra Granik's ‘Winter's Bone’ (2010)
Debra Granik’s ‘Winter’s Bone’ is a must-watch. While it has been considered boring by some viewers, there is an undoubtedly profound beauty to its construction, details, and performances which cannot go unnoticed.
Winter’s Bone is an atmospheric, mythical tale about loss, family and childhood innocence, presented against a beautifully realistic backdrop of the Ozarks in Missouri. The story follows 17-year-old Ree Dolly (played by the then relatively unknown Jennifer Lawrence), who lives in a hostile rural mountain community; a place where, despite the number of blood relations, family ties seem to mean absolutely nothing.
Winter’s Bone (2010). Anonymous Content and Winter’s Bone Productions
The setting itself provides the perfect backdrop for themes of distrust and suspicion; the skeletal trees, white hills, and icy roads create a cold and bleak atmosphere, oozing desperation and hostility. The sense of place is so strong it is almost a character in itself.
The mountain community is riddled with illegal methamphetamine labs which Ree’s father, Jessup, is involved in, leading to his mysterious disappearance. Ree is told at the beginning of the film that in order to keep her house, her father must turn up to his court hearing.
Having not heard from him and having no leads as to where he may be, Ree decides to take it upon herself to get information from the rest of the community. However, she is met with overwhelming silence, threat, and aggression, all while simultaneously having to be self-sufficient and care for her siblings due to her mother’s deteriorating mental health.
This ‘atmospheric, moody, [and] strangely disturbing piece of work’[1] as Mark Kermode puts it in his BBC Radio review (click here to watch), beautifully conveys a gradual loss of innocence through the contrast of childhood and the harsh adult world that Ree must navigate in order to find her father.
The director, Debra Granik, mobilises this theme in as realistic a world as possible. Granik has said in a 2011 interview (click here to watch) that she would ‘always start with a documentary sensibility, meaning [that] in the way [she] actually gather[s] the information [it] would be considered very similar to any documentary technique.’[2] She has people with the lived experience ‘fuse the script with the accuracy that would come from having known it and lived it.’[3]
This is clear in the final product of Winter’s Bone. We feel as if we are living alongside the characters, witnessing their way of life, and joining Ree on her mission to find her father.
This authenticity makes Ree’s struggle into adulthood all the more heart-breaking to watch, as faint echoes of nostalgia are created through motifs of childhood and shots of Ree’s younger siblings playing in the quiet moments between significant scenes. Over the course of the film, we mourn Ree’s fading innocence as she witnesses more and more of the corrupt community in which she resides.
Her circumstances force her to behave like an adult, but she is never treated like one, and Lawrence’s contained performance strikes the perfect balance between the two. She successfully conveys her sense of restraint and her struggle to deal with the patronising silence of the town, while also raising her siblings like her own children.
She beautifully underplays the role, exercising a modern approach to teenage angst. Unlike in the 1980s, when intense emotion was displayed in the face of adults who ‘just don’t get it’, Lawrence, among other young actors in recent years, opted for the more internalised, restrained technique. ‘If Method actors were neurotic and bipolar, [actors like Lawrence] are anxious and depressive’[4]. Her performance works perfectly to convey this sense of hardened emotion in the face of adversity.
Winter’s Bone (2010). Anonymous Content and Winter’s Bone Productions
Winter’s Bone is a film that depicts a quietly observed world hidden deep within the mountains of Missouri. It isn’t showy, it is simply a beautiful, yet sorrowful depiction of a young girl’s journey to find her father. The mingling of desire for truth and authenticity, and the somewhat mythical nature of the tale itself, provides a deep and gripping portrayal of Ree’s transition into adulthood.
Andrew Purcell says Winter’s Bone is ‘essentially a fairytale about a girl on a quest to find her missing father, but its ogres are methamphetamine cooks, addicts and dealers’[6]. While this is an apt observation, at its heart the film seems to be a commentary on family ties offering no solace, and self-sufficiency being crucial to survival in rural communities such as this one, educating us on a way of life many of us are unfamiliar with, and urging us to empathise with the Ree’s heartbreaking journey and adversities in the adult world.
By Lily Roberts - Film Pathway
[1] BBC Radio. (2015). ‘Winter's Bone reviewed by Mark Kermode’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ldpy8. [Accessed on: 01/09/2021].
[2] DP/30: The Oral History Of Hollywood. (2011). ‘DP/30: Winter's Bone, co-writer/director Debra Granik’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbgKUW6cWQ8. [Accessed on: 01/09/2021].
[3] Ibid
[4] Enelow, S. (2016). ‘The Great Recession’, Film Comment, 52(5), pp 56-61.
[5] Ibid
[6] Purcell, A. (2011). ‘The nominees: “I must keep a vow. I'm going to watch a circus”’, The Guardian [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/feb/24/winters-bone-director-debra-granik-oscars. [Accessed on: 01/09/2021].