Winters Bone

`Winter's Bone', co-written and directed by Debra Granik, is a bleak and downbeat story of the marginalised underclass of dirt-poor rural white people in the Ozark Mountains; a welcome dose of realism in contrast to the usual fare of vacuous, glossy and lavish-budget Hollywood escapism/action movies. It's an uncompromising film with a simple plot line and features an astounding performance from the young Jennifer Lawrence as the female lead. You are likely to wake up the next day still thinking about this film, and its haunting images may linger long in memory.

I know the Ozarks in NW Arkansas and southern Missouri, and the film's social detail is exactly right. This is a side of America rarely featured in film: life lived in the raw by an isolated population in the backwoods, predominantly unemployed/self-sufficient and semi-destitute, the wreckage of broken-down old cars and appliances rusting in the yards of tumbledown shacks barely fit for habitation; subsistence living far from a complex urban consumer-society in which they have no stake. There is no non-white tokenism in the film's cast, so in this detail it's also uncompromisingly true to life. These folks live by an ancient code of blood ties, extended family bonds and militant non-co-operation with the law; illegal `cooking' of and addiction to life-wrecking methamphetamine - known as `crank' - is common. Another realistic detail is that no-one in the film has a cellphone or a computer or can even aspire to owning one: those everyday gadgets of the global consumer-matrix are as alien in this environment as they might be to someone in the 16th century. The most hi-tech life ever gets out here is a rusty old pick-up truck, a chain-saw and a gun.

Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a 17-year old forced to grow up fast and take on the role of the only responsible adult in the rural shack they call home. Ree cares for her catatonic, mentally incapable mother and her younger brother and sister. She is told her estranged father, arrested for distilling crank, put up the family shack as a bail bond and subsequently disappeared: if he doesn't turn up for his court date, the family shack will be forfeit and Ree and her siblings "...be thrown out into the fields, to live like dogs" - bleak indeed.

The film's simple, slow-paced plot principally involves Ree searching for her father, to find out if he's alive or dead and so save the family home (if she can prove he's dead, the bail will be annulled). In her search she demonstrates patience, resilience and determination and is in turn met by hostility, non-co-operation and eventually physical violence from the scattered community whose code of honor is that "ya don't ask no questions, and ya don't never tell." Her quiet and principled persistence eventually wins over some unlikely allies, and there is a resolution of sorts but hardly a `happy ending.'

The film has many poignant and harrowing scenes, but Lawrence's performance throughout is truly outstanding and utterly convincing (she was raised in Tennessee in a similar rural environment to that portrayed in the film). The cast are mostly unknowns and portray to perfection the kind of people you'd cross the street to avoid and never, ever pick a fight with - the women as well as the men. There is no humor in the film, but the serious tone throughout is somehow right for the sombre subject matter. You will utterly, completely believe in the characters and in the story: in style it's more like documentary than fictional drama, with a welcome absence of melodrama and no attempt to emotionally manipulate the audience. So if it's lightweight entertainment and laughs you're after, you better steer clear of this film.

`Winter's Bone' has received widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for (though didn't win) a number of 2011 Academy Awards, and picked up both the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Films and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. The soundtrack is also excellent: genuine Ozark musicians playing mountain music on banjo and guitar. The film is very, very good, and I only drop it from 5 stars due to its rather bleak storyline and slightly less than satisfying (though not unbelievable) denouement. If you appreciate good, serious, quality film making you should definitely see it.

A story is of the inherited, perhaps, from a colonial Mother-country's legislation allowing throwing a family out of a property owned by a single member in response to this person's deeds whether bail-related (as in this movie) or simply demented actions used expertly by the age care strangers-involved not in Australia, probably, only.

A middle-U.S.A. short-of-usual-sports-cars-and-boyfrends seventeen year old girl growing up siblings and looking after a mentally charged mother searches for and finds an evidence of father's passing away to secure a family home targeted by the State as a bail refund for dad's not appearing at the hearing.

It is a very educative story of a British system reality well survived two centuries of the U.S. independence.

I'd like to know what's different about this blu-ray edition from the earlier one. I can't seem to find the run time on it. I'm desperately looking for the original DVD that I rented through Red Box which had a run time of about 143 minutes. The current DVD (which I unwittingly bought)and blu-ray offered on Amazon is a later version that is cut to 100 minutes. In my opinion 43 minutes of valuable footage was cut for what I reason I can't fathom.

If this NEW blu-ray version has the complete footage, I'd snap it up. Does anyone know?

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