Winter's Bone at Sundance/SXSW '10

The Grand Jury Prize for the U.S. Dramatic Competition went to Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell. This slow-moving noir is primarily concerned with mise en scène, at the expense of any complex understanding of interpersonal relationships between the film's richly painted characters. We follow Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) as she searches throughout the Ozarks to find her father, who is wanted by the cops for his trial indicting him for running a meth lab.  Ree goes from house to house, down dirt and gravel roads, only to find unhelpful hillbillies with little nice to say or do for her.


Ree, a young woman, is the default matriarch of the fatherless family.  Her mother is debilitated and mute.  Ree must care for her and her two younger siblings.  Lawrence shows intuition moving through the rural landscape.  If only the same could be said of the director's maneuvering through the mountains.  Granik shoots the Ozarks in a staid blue, filling the screen with the browns and dark greens of the Ozark's underbrush, underbelly, underworld.  And that's effective.  When Granik puts the camera on the mass of mountain-dwelling people, however, she ends up painting blank, ineffective cutouts.  There's even a scene that features a jug band -- banjo and all.  For atmosphere?

There's a sort-of surprise ending to the film, but for me it wasn't worth it.  It feels as though all of the atmospheric/mise en scene work was to justify and lead us to this ending, but that the ending didn't work as the only piece of straightforward narrative storytelling meant that all of the work setting the Appalachian scene was for naught.  Lawrence's performance, the cinematography, and one particular Ozarkette with a violent streak and a hidden side are the film's redeeming elements, but in the end they are just not redeeming enough.