Winter’s Bone
Unlike Precious and Frozen River (the latter I enjoyed for its performances), Winter's Bone feels lived-in; it doesn't feel like the filmmakers are above the material judging it, smugly proud of the way their exploiting their marginalized, poverty stricken characters for the sake of impressing the Sundance crowds in the name of "understanding these characters" or "showing us a world we've never seen before because we're too concerned with our own lives to look worry about it." Meth is a driving force in this film, but it never makes an appearance; drug trafficking is the cause for a lot of the fear for the Dolly clan, yet, there are no chase scenes or moments where we follow the characters into the despair of drug use. No, that kind of mentality isn't on display here as writer-director Debra Granik, working off a novel by Daniel Woodrell, is too smart for that. She fashions her film, instead, in the style of the Dardenne brothers (the masters of minimalist cinema) where she relentlessly follows her lead character, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) as she searchers for her father Jessup, a meth dealer and "cooker", who has put their house up for bond, and if she doesn't find him in one week she will lose the house that she and her younger brother and sister and comatose mother are staying in (not to mention the timber land they own). The camera always stays on Ree, even when other characters enter a house, the film doesn't cut away to show another point of view. We watch the events of her life unfold as nuance after nuance of her odyssey seem to build and compound upon one another until before we even realize it we're knee deep in a thriller, and the film doesn't let us go of its grip until the final cut to black.
