Under the heading of “Beowulfian Protestantism”: A wildly tested backwoods young woman keeps honest while her frayed community can’t quite
*This is a not-very-obvious allusion to a song lyric: “Why deny the obvious child?,” from a song by Paul Simon on his The Rhythm of the Saints album.
[A longer version of this blog entry may be available to select recipients who want it. Edits were done 5/17/12 and 5/21/12; notable is between asterisks. Another edit done 4/5/13.]
Background: My original plan of action
For several weeks now I had the idea to review the film The Hunger Games, though I knew I’d be stepping into risky territory, since it was such a big hit, and not only would it have its passionate defenders (and that among genre enthusiasts, which I think it’s fairly clear I am not [entirely]), but it is still a throbbing “going concern,” a movie still raking it in (I think I heard it took in $4 million the weekend of May 13, long after its big weekly takes in March-April). I generally feel that such a film is good not to try to come out blogging about, especially from an opinionated viewpoint. I have reviewed a few recent films, but by and large, these are films that either have dropped out of theaters or were never terribly big hits; and in any event I review films I like for some important reason, so I don’t think my reviews would be seen by those with vested interests in these films as any sort of “kiss of death.”
The situation with The Hunger Games, I felt, would be a little different. I did not expect to be a supporter of the film. Now mind you, I like to approach all the films I speak on with an open mind; but with all the hype, and the type of genre it was, I just felt The Hunger Games put me in the following sort of position: I wanted to be fair to it, so I wanted to view it first before I did anything resembling condemning it.
I am less tongue-in-cheek to say that I wanted to see Winter’s Bone (2010) first, because this was the breakout film for Jennifer Lawrence, and she is the star of Hunger Games too. Now without getting too much here into my standards and objectives in reviewing films and actors (to the extent I am aware of them), I would say I had mixed feelings about Ms. Lawrence—not that I felt she was a flash in the pan or an empress with no clothes. Indeed I was interested to see what kind of young actress she was, and I felt the indy Winter’s Bone, with its tiny budget and not-family-fare subject matter, would be a good means of measuring her. I remember when it was first out, and pictures of some of the cast were shown, there was this attractive young woman in some scene with apparent poor whites, and she was extolled as being really good in her role.
Once The Hunger Games came out, and references were made to Ms. Lawrence’s having been in Winter’s Bone, I started to smell a bit of a rat. Of course, the marketing machinery behind Hunger Games, the media svengalis and operators with their antennae developing (1) a sense of what was (or should be) big and (2) their action plans, all dished up Ms. Lawrence to us as the next bright young female star—in March-April, she was on a range of magazine covers, and was even profiled admiringly in Rolling Stone (more on this later).
In search of Ms. Lawrence
All this struck my interested but not fully-delving-into senses along these initial-impression lines: she seemed like someone’s daughter who had just graduated from college, and had gotten lucky. She seemed attractive but a little nondescript. I wanted to know more, but I just didn’t get around to “taking the real test,” Winter’s Bone, yet.
Then there was the elaborate “liberal arts” essay in the (Sunday) April 1 New York Times talking about Katniss Everdeen as a new kind of hero for young women, with one of the two movie critics (who were trading opinions like two grandees in an American Studies seminar) saying, as she had in her prior review of The Hunger Games, that she felt Ms. Lawrence had been miscast, even though….
Well, I have seen Winter’s Bone, and I like it. It is a sadly touching little story that is not to all tastes, but in treating some segment of tough life in a sort of semi-documentary fashion and with a thriller plot, it not only is pretty much up my alley, but it seems as admirable a work borne of dedication as it is a jolt of salty liquor to get (and keep) down. And I came to see pretty much what I suspected with Jennifer Lawrence: she is a country girl, who does know how to act, well. She acts with a pretty baby-doll face that seems usually to remain about the same, but emotes eloquently, trenchantly, and/or fluently, mainly through her eyes and controlled voice.
And this is a good thing: she can act. Young women: as if it needs to be said: a pretty face doesn’t last forever, but good work habits do. Learn to be skilled at your chosen career when you are young (and pretty), so that when you’re no longer young (and probably no longer pretty), you still have solid work to do that gives you a place in the community, if not also a place in the hearts of an audience taking in your work.
Now I will hold off viewing The Hunger Games—this is largely a matter of practical considerations, and partly because Winter’s Bone gives us enough to chew on here.
A humorous prefatory interlude
Winter’s Bone doesn’t really need added humor, especially of a relatively broad type. For one thing, it does have its little, subtle, situation-suited touches of humor (such as Ree sniffing inside a Tupperware container of who knows what, handing it off to sister Ashlee and saying, “Better than nothing”). You could have had—maybe in a DVD extra—the amateur actor Ron “Stray Dog” Hall (who is indeed, and importantly, included in the movie; more on him below), commenting (in a soliloquy, similar to what he does do in the “making-of” doc) on one way someone (fictitious) in the community found a unique avenue to economic freedom:
“We have this woman in town, she got lucky. She wrote genre horsecrap, vampire romances and werewolf/gothic…whatever. Took no imagination to write. Its only distinction was redefining the word banal for banal readers. She thought she had an oil well. She got an agent, and got her stuff published by a major New York
A movie is made of a local-color novel, on a community and family that may seem alien, yet are not so much
Winter’s Bone is based on the same-titled novel by Daniel Woodrell. The film depicts a sort of mini-odyssey of a 17-year-old woman, Ree Dolly, played by Lawrence, whose father (along with whatever else he did for a living) produced that modern scourge of rural American areas, methamphetamine, which not only makes for addiction issues and all the related interpersonal and social mayhem and legal issues, but also occasional disaster when a “meth lab,” a place where the “crank” is “cooked,” explodes, not only revealing a hitherto-secret source of contraband, but maybe killing the “lab” workers with it. It turns out that meth defines the community in which Ree lives, to a large extent; other people within (long) walking distance, on relatively isolated homesteads or farms, are involved in the meth trade too, and hence meth helps define the local economy, as well as adds a certain hardhearted set of code of silence, manners, and even sense of family honor.
The families by and large have lived on their land for generations (some seem to run a bona fide cattle farm, for beef or milk one would presume, while others seem to operate merely subsistence farms), and they have a sort of stoic, unpretentious, kinship-acknowledging and yet bitter-distance-revealing quality—a product of generations of hard living that demands and breeds intestinal fortitude, but also coheres with a sort of bitter competitiveness between branches of families that is familiar to me and seems rather old-time Protestant. Yet all this moral hardness and warmth-amid-bitterness seems overlaid with another set of moral inclinations and demands, familiar from movies like The Godfather: the drug trade has made a lot of these people outlaws, hence they operate like a sort of hill-country Mafia. So not only does a distant relative like the local patriarch Thump Milton command respect related to the hill-country ethos of rugged Protestantism, but he also incites fear because there is a sort of code of omerta to be heeded, and stoolies will pay the ultimate price, and so on: he is a local Vito Corleone, except with cowboy hat and laconic, sure manner.
This is a way to try to understand the world of outlaw yet longtime-land-bound culture the movie presents. It also raises a key question of how accurate the film is to the culture it portrays, which it may be. Relevantly, later I will look more dispassionately at the more general nature of Missouri
The movie, made resourcefully, wins many awards or award-nominations
Winter’s Bone was directed by Debra Granik (see end note 1 for awards she received for this film), a graduate of the film school at N.Y.U. who started relatively late in life working as a director. Age about 48 now, she seems to have been a kind of liberal-cause person oriented to media work typical of some Jewish backgrounds: her Wikipedia entry says she received a B.A. from Brandeis, “where she majored in politics and became very interested in documentary film, democratic media, and feminism. After graduation, Granik started making educational films for trade unions.” Winter’s Bone was Granik’s second full-length feature; she had won an award for a short in 1998. She cowrote the screenplay for Winter’s Bone with Anne Rosellini, the film’s producer, and shot the film in February-March 2009, according to DVD commentary, in a southwestern Missouri locale similar to the area the novel is about (the cattle-auction scene takes place in Springfield
The film won best-film and best-screenplay awards at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2010, and was released in the U.S. Lawrence
This film, shot in 24 1/2 days, benefited from preparation: preproduction, which included scouting locations, took place for about two or three years before filming. The house used by Ree in the film was originally an empty house (richly fitted out for the film by the production director) and is located on property that was near, or part of the home property, of Ashlee Thompson, the young girl, never before in films, who played Ree’s sister, also named Ashlee. There was a range of people playing parts in the film: more established actors such as Lawrence and John Hawkes; members of a north Arkansas acting workshop including Lauren Sweetser (more on her below), who plays Ree’s best friend Gail, and Kody Brown, who plays Gail’s husband Floyd. Dale Dickey, the third most interesting actor in the film (more on her below), plays Merab Milton [note: I am unclear on her surname; movie-related information I access online, as well as the movie DVD, doesn't seem to make this clear]. Tate Taylor, an actor from Mississippi Queens , N.Y.
I mention all these people not simply because it may (or may not) take a village to raise a child, but it sometimes takes a temporary village of people from all sorts of backgrounds—many Southern in some way or other, but differing by more specific locality—to make a film that limns a sort of Southern-gothic situation in a not-quite-Southern location. This “village” has contributed to making a film that both has a perhaps-tastefully spiky texture of “local color” and yet, as I hope to show, seems a little troubling with its combining a sort of distorting gothic quality with more realistic features (especially when locals are utilized, if not exploited, to make a film whose story may in some ways run harshly counter to what the locals, in particular, really are about).
The novel’s author is from the area on which he writes, and obviously would like to give some vivid life to an area of the country he knows so well, which would seem to include some kind of moral response to its more untoward or mystifying features. Pretty much on first or second viewing, and more as I’ve pondered the film, I’ve wondered with how much fidelity the novel reflects the culture it depicts (at least one review of the film wondered something similar). I mean, it seems to deviate to some degree, but how much? But if we assume that in the main the novel and film echo the realities well enough, then inevitable amplification, moral or rhetorical emphasis or shading, and so on will have the story tell a somewhat more “tendentious” tale than you might get from simple journalistic mimesis. This might serve a “higher purpose” (if not simply pander to a hungry market of ignoramuses) similarly to how a New Jersey story may harp too loudly and too long on a batch of ignorant young people of Italian stock tanning at the Shore, or some more old-fashioned, hackneyed Mafia situation….
Again, I note that I like Winter’s Bone, and I think its problems are outweighed by its merits; but perhaps my best measure of how “real” this film is comes when I look at an interesting improvisation done by one of the film’s actors, Ron “Stray Dog” Hall, an amateur and resident within the Missouri location of the shoot (whom I made part of a joking hypothetical above), which is included within a DVD extra.
One’s regional background shapes artists’ creation, and audience’s view, of this film
I am very much a northeasterner, yet—almost shocking incongruously now, after all these years—I lived in St. Louis St. Louis Missouri Midwest , the West, and the South; indeed, it was a region of some contention prior to the Civil War, when there was an issue of how far slavery would be allowed inside it. The Ozark mountains in the south partly extend into Arkansas Arkansas , and (according to Granik in DVD commentary) adjusted her own regional accent enough to the southern Missouri regional flavor, and Lawrence
The end result is that these women ended up lending their natural affinity for the needs of the story to make a good pair of southern Missouri
A little later I will return to what this region is like, from my own amateurish perspective. First, we’ll look at some moral components of the story that are among its most striking and also give it its most universal aspects. (An end note 4, which contains my “bona fides” for being able to write on rural living, will not be included here, but may be with a longer, separately available version. Item of trivia: Believe it or not, there actually was a meth lab started in my home county, Sussex County , N.J.
The gothic/pastoral story, amid drugs and violent gestures
To return to the plot: Ree’s father has gone missing. Ree is old enough to help care for her two young siblings, a brother and a sister, as well as a mother with an unnamed mental illness, who steadily takes medication (Ree tells someone the pills seem not to help, but her mother keeps taking them [how universal, on a level, this actually is]) and doesn’t speak. Ree is, as I will explain more later, a parentified child, a category that may seem unfamiliar to you, so I’ll try to make it less so.
A sheriff turns up at Ree’s house and sets the thriller-type plot in motion. Her father, Jessup, is due to appear in court on some meth-related charge; he had been out on bail, but has gone missing. If he doesn’t turn up in court next week, there is a big problem: not having the money, he put up the house and land as collateral for the bond. If Jessup doesn’t appear in court and the court decides to collect the bond, the house and land will be seized, and Ree and her family will have no home.
Ree is tough, hard-bitten yet not cynical, and is stoical. One of Lawrence
Suitable humor can be noted: when she is teaching her brother Sonny how to skin and field-dress a squirrel, he asks innocently, “Do we eat these parts?” Ree answers with slight irony, “Not yet.”
Ree is laconic, yet says enough to maintain the control she has to. She maintains a certain steely reserve (Lawrence Lawrence
Ree’s sincere search meets with labyrinthine tendencies of the community
The story then has Ree traipse, intrepidly, the long distances to different homesteads looking for, or trying to get information on the whereabouts of, her father. Not in the actual order of events: A neighbor tries to throw her off the trail by pointing out a burned house and suggesting her father died when the meth lab there exploded (Ree sees through this by noting the height of the weeds in the house). Satchel-faced, initially-solicitous Merab tries to make clear to Ree that local patriarch Thump Milton won’t talk to her because “talking just causes witnesses.” A local ne’er-do-well (with a pet white rat) named Little Arthur, apparently part of the Milton
There is a web of what might strike outsiders as an oddly unhelpful aggregate of tendencies: supposed relatives aren’t as warmly helpful as you might expect (even while Ree points out the family-relation aspect, which can backfire with whom she confronts about it); there is a tendency for some not to help simply because, as becomes evident, Jessup Dolly has begun to turn state’s evidence, and here the Mafia-like quality to the community becomes evident: there’s going to be no sympathy for a rat. As the story progresses, we have Ree, who seems almost implausibly more virtuous than many in her community, becoming desperate to find her father in order not to lose her home (later she explains that keeping the home is essential to her meeting her elemental responsibilities to care for her siblings and forever-sick mother); and almost like a waif who elementally doesn’t belong there, she seems to run into the coldness of a community that is about as tough—in its ambiguous signals to her and more Mafia-like unwillingness to help—as she has been in holding the sheriff at arm’s length.
I should note that while there are numerous professional actors here as I’ve already described, in numerous cases (as I also suggested) local people played roles—including the neighbor that showed Ree the burned house, and even Thump Milton. If the local (and basically amateur) players have an adult inflection yet a certain colorlessness or artlessness about them (which may suit the overall tone sought for the community), and the locally based professional actors have more color and yet a certain heightened regional flavoring, you still get a sense of this community that is emotionally and morally complex, and can be picked up in repeated viewings. They may seem like superficially banal hicks at first, but the direct, efficient manners cohere with a general ethos of a people who both (1) try to live according to the demands of a historically “culturally simple” region and yet (2) have a complexity related to clannish bonds, land-based history, and more recent (and fairly distorting) outlaw behavior. This is a fascinating mixture that I think the script works fairly well to get down. What the novel is like, I don’t know.
What is a parentified child?
This term is apparently in the province of social work, and maybe social psychology, neither of which I formally studied in. A parentified child is one who, due to circumstances (the loss or long-term absence or one or both parents), takes over a parental role within the remaining family to some extent, not least in helping raise children in the family (this Wikipedia article helps you to start to understand the concept, but it may go in directions irrelevant to my discussion here; you might Google “parentified child” for sources some of which seem solidly scholarly, though without my firsthand familiarity with them, I can’t vouch for them). In the U.S., this role seems usually to occur among Black families, but there is nothing inherent in it that says it can’t occur among white families also.
The first time I was exposed to the term is one anecdotal and autobiographical matter that helps get at the heart of the concept, both in terms of what it means and how people who haven’t lived the category deal with it. In November 1986, the year I moved back to New Jersey from the Washington, D.C., area for the first time since 1982, I was consulting very briefly with a social worker who had been the last talking counselor I’d seen in high school, for a few months in 1980 (others I’d seen longer in previous years). In 1986, mistakenly thinking this man remembered my situation and family from the late 1970s and in 1980 (he didn’t really), I tried to get his help regarding my mother, and among other things (many of which were not helpful), he said, and I paraphrase, “Did you know the determination was made [in the 1970s-80] that you were a parentified child?” I had never been aware of this before, and in fact nothing in my session notes from 1976-80, all of which I later saw, said anything about this. The counselor would turn out, through about February 1987, to be unhelpful in other, clearer ways (some relatively trivial, some profound), after which I would start an elaborate complaint process about him at the mental-health center where he worked, which went into summer 1987, shortly before I left town for graduate school.
Ever since 1986, I’ve thought—accepting the term enough, if at first puzzled by it and rather scornful of it—about what it meant to be a parentified child. I think the main thing about it, for a person who occupies this role, is that if you have little other choice than to take it, it’s absolutely objectionable for someone else to second-guess the role as a general fact or your business in occupying it, or to analyze it (against your will) “on your behalf.” As Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / they have to take you in.” Similarly, if your family has no other way to function than to have you, a child, assume a “parentified role,” you have to do it, and no one else has a right to say anything critical about it. (In my own case it didn’t so much involve “helping raise my sister,” who is fairly close in age to me, as it did making up for a certain lack of center of gravity in the family due to my mother’s shortcomings—and also, in a sense, due to her neediness.)
Ree’s story—as clearly a case of being a parentified child, with mother incapacitated and father gone (and discovered deceased)—is touching to me for the reason that I know firsthand what it means to be a parentified child, but I also know it means something you do because you have to, to maintain a semblance of authority that supports a decent, providing-for family life when its normal source of leadership is fatally absent. And it shows society’s most vulnerable, if not blameworthy, point when it cannot recognize or respect the living instances and the occasional moral need for this role. From a different standpoint, I would testify from my own experience that the hardest thing about living this life is others’ inabilities to understand it or their tendency to jump to wrong conclusions about it. In short, a society that blindly infringes on or shows contempt for this role is society at its most Nazi-ish.
Though Winter’s Bone, in what it depicts, gives some ground for commenting on society’s tragic blindness to Ree’s kind of parentified role, I think that like other things that the movie rather skims over—because its plate is full with its apparent main concerns—the “society blindness” theme takes a back seat to the presentation of Ree as a kind of hero who seems so starkly so that it’s a little hard to know how she really does it. For one thing, her community seems to comprise mainly little more than extended family a lot of which functions like a kind of drug-based Mafia, and lawmen who seem alternately “coolly apt to do their job” and impotent.
It pays to understand the particularities of a subregion
To look again at the particular region in which Winter’s Bone is set: As I look at a map of this region of the country, I remind myself that not only would the different areas of the country—Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southern Missouri—have natural sub-regional differences, but those parts of the country—while the voices may seem similar to outsiders—are fairly far apart in miles. To travel just about halfway up Missouri from St. Louis New Jersey New Jersey
There is this foregoing reasonable way to start to zero in on the particular style of a region, but also, in my banal efforts at background research, I look in Jessica Lynch’s autobiographic book I Am a Soldier, Too (Knopf, 2003), with her West Virginia hopefully giving me some handle on southern Ozarks qualities; and I check through Bill Clinton’s autobiography (My Life, Knopf, 2004), for some presumably more apropos local-color lessons from his native Arkansas. Suffice it to say that we need to make attempts to not just lump everyone from a raft of mutually distant big states into one pot of understanding as “hicks who belong in a Deliverance-type movie,” and thus think that Winter’s Bone is yet one more heapin’ helpin’ of this sort of fare.
I’m sure the filmmakers saw there was a danger of this stereotyping happening, and yet it doesn’t help that some marketing touches seem like facile handles, such as, among DVD packaging aspects for the movie, touches like electric slide guitar for some background music of a menu, which seems a little hokey. It seems no matter what bit of American country culture you decorate a national-audience work of art with, tastes are all over the spectrum, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the beholder’s intelligence. I myself feel that you can’t go wrong with any music with acoustic slide guitar, and I like the bluegrass picking interlude in this film; I also like “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” from the Coen brothers’ obviously stylized O Brother, Where Are Thou?, which southern Missouri folk may feel types me as a philistine on a par with outsiders to New Jersey feeling it’s all full of Mafia and Jersey Shore types.
All this said, I am surprised how much Winter’s Bone, particularly its rural hardness and family values (so to speak), is familiar to me, not only because I am familiar with “country types” after having lived in the semi-rural part of New Jersey I have for decades, but the contradictory inclinations between relatives in this film—bitterness or aloofness at some times, and willingness to lend a hand at others—is very familiar from my own family (but my family’s version of this is more a function of, among other things, both German tendencies among some members and, generally speaking, “neuroticism,” not rural location). In Winter’s Bone, while it almost seems a joke (to potential flip outsiders) how families between remote homesteads seem related, it more genuinely (and sadly) seems the only sense of love or filial mutual-supportiveness in this world is between people within the same household.
The “bugger thy neighbor” quality that this film’s world contains between different households also strikes me as “very New Jersey ” [by the way, I didn't originate this phrase, "bugger thy neighbor"; I saw this used by the writer William Gaddis in his novel A Frolic of His Own, on which see this April 3, 2013, blog entry]. Here in New Jersey
On a more bookwormish note, I would note that Winter’s Bone is, at least in its simple story aspect, like Faulkner without the verbal jazz (Ree walking all over her countryside reminds me of the pregnant Lena walking across state lines in his Light in August), or like Flannery O’Connor without the conspicuous black humor.
An uncle, Teardrop, bridges ingenuous Ree with shadowy community
Amid all the elements of the story I’ve recounted, the most interesting character—aside from the touchingly sympathetic character of Ree—is her uncle “Teardrop,” from whom she first seeks help—without success—relatively early on. This is when she makes clear he needs to help her find her father because of his impending court date, and Teardrop is firm in pointing out that it is up to her father whether he goes to court, etc. He underscores his point with some of the first violence (of sorts) shown to Ree by anyone in the film.
Later, at a neighbor’s wood-splitter, Teardrop reappears to Ree, now more willing to help; for one thing, Jessup’s father’s car has been found, burned (presumably by a resentful local not sympathetic to rats). Jessup may be dead. Soon enough, Ree’s agenda changes—especially after a bail bondsman appears, once the court date has passed, and tells Ree that, with her house subject to seizure (while some shortfall in the original bond arrangement was covered by some anonymous donor putting up some cash), either she provide proof of her father’s death in about a week, or she loses the house. Teardrop then is her ally in some efforts to track down proof of her father’s death.
Ree tries again to get in touch with Thump Milton—which Merab had firmly warned against—because Thump would be the one, if anyone, to know where Jessup’s remains are. She appears again at the Milton
John Hawkes, the one other top-billed actor, plays Teardrop in a way that rather distills what the darker side of this community is in one character. If Ree is the improbable soul of virtue that somehow this community produces, Teardrop is an adult product of it: someone who can alternately be corrupt—Teardrop is a meth user—and seemingly cold to young kin, and yet able to become a warm father figure to her at about the last moment that it is essential.
As we grow older and being “cool” and “normal” and such juvenile concepts become too jejune, we may realize that no one is immune from some kind of tough criticism, that everyone is someone else’s weirdo. Each of us is a weirdo to someone. But the trick is not to be everyone’s weirdo. Most of us happen to accomplish that. Meanwhile, John Hawkes’ portrayal of Teardrop is like his flirting with being “everyone’s dirtbag.” While some of the locals playing male Milton
Teardrop often provides the plot function of revealing what is known about Ree’s father, or what he is willing to let on her to about him—not that he is necessarily being coy with this. Of course, in the scene that establishes his character, in his own kitchen, Teardrop is quite the disgusting sight while mumbling seemingly aphoristically in response to Ree (in a sort of barely-decipherable Western-cadenced manner, where his tone gets across what words don’t) and he conveys, e.g., that it is up to the one who’s going to prison whether his whereabouts are known (even to his own daughter). He plays with a gun absently, stoops a bit in standing as if he’s hungover…and makes brutally clear he’s not going to help Ree. Later, in an interesting scene where his relationship to Ree again brings out her tough but innocent forbearance, he approaches her at a log splitter she is using and indicates he has heard her father’s car was found burned out, and her father was nowhere to be seen: bottom line, her father is dead.
Still later (a little more than midway through the movie), in a pickup truck after Teardrop has rescued her from Thump Milton’s barn, he comments to Ree in the dim light that her father “couldn’t face his next bust,” which could have led to a 10-year sentence, so he “started talking to the sheriff.” Of course, this was verboten within the community. *He adds, “I don’t know for certain who killed my little brother [by whom he means Jessup]. If you find out, I don't want to know.” [My previous rendering of this was in error.]* “You owe me now,” he reminds Ree, innocuously enough (for him).
A little later, as Teardrop is driving himself and Ree back from a rather impulsively opted-for trip to a bar, he is pulled over by the local sheriff, the same one who had delivered news to Ree that her father’s court date is coming up, etc. There is a bit of a standoff in which the sheriff demands Teardrop get out of his vehicle, while Teardrop subtly but unmistakably handles a rifle, just enough for the sheriff to be aware of it. This is one of the more gripping western-style confrontations in the film. The sheriff, gauging his situation, stands down and lets them go. Later, near the end of the film, when delivering proof of her father’s death to the sheriff, the sheriff admonishes Ree not to talk about him around town (as one of the film’s more typical and obviously-plausible representations is the power of gossip in small towns), because he is afraid of what a story about his standing down would do to his reputation…and Ree assures him self-confidently she never talks about him, “ever.”
At the end of the film, in what passes for this film’s show of the hope ahead for the truncated family of Ree and her two small charges, Teardrop shows up, seeming downright well-meaning compared to earlier; and yet he offers a last somewhat cryptic revelation: “I know who got rid of him.” But it’s clear neither will he say who at this point, nor does Ree seem inclined to find out.
In a way, the rather simplistically delivered plot points are beside the point of this film. They almost seem like an excuse to have the film be a sort of western-sad “odyssey setting” for the person we most care about: Ree, which in turn is the occasion for probably the most “nutritious” part of this film, Lawrence’s touching and resourceful performance.
Some destination points, with a final note of hope about Lawrence
The denouement of this movie involves, on the surface, Ree’s getting the proof of her father’s death that she direly needs to keep her home, but in more detail, the facts of how this happens comprise quite a grisly set of conditions. I won’t describe it here, other than to say it involves Merab using a chainsaw (and this time Ree doesn’t get hurt), and Lawrence
I like this movie, but at times, it is fairly grim going; and though it is important for art to look at harder lives to show how virtue can be maintained with sustained effort or grace amid horrors, this movie features enough tough conditions that I choke up a bit when it reaches its end, as the actress playing Ree’s younger sister picks up Jessup’s banjo (after Teardrop has played it a bit, with fingering as if it was a guitar), and, as a small child would, strums the strings a bit. I choke up not simply because of the poignancy of the story, but because the actress playing Ashlee is actually an unaffected girl who lives in that region, and she probably felt as if, when the movie crew came to town, goggle-eyed E.T. has come in a starship to party with locals and uplift lives. Who knows what life this young girl would have afterward. Well, maybe we need not worry about her too much. Who worries about any of us? We make it through.
I come to my last set of points, which go to how true this movie is to its source community. This movie, for this blog, poses some of the same complexities as does The Crucible, in that there are layers of complexity to sort through, to see what in it we should really believe in: here, there is (1) the unusual local community to understand; and there is (2) the artist’s prerogative (i.e., the novelist’s and the director’s, which may have been slightly different) to portray it in certain heightened ways (hopefully not too melodramatic or distorting) for some intended end—either moral (which may be too “arch” for the community at issue) or otherwise artistic (such as to make a sort of Greek tragedy, heightening the existential pressures and questions, to the extent possible out of a more indifferent local situation). As it turns out, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, Daniel Woodrell, writes a genre called “country noir,” as is noted on his Wikipedia bio. As I move through my last points, I head toward a consideration related to how the actor who portrayed Thump offered to improvise his own take on what Thump would say when Ree was being called on the carpet in the Milton garage, and his improvisation was filmed and ultimately included at the end of the DVD documentary on the movie’s making. How he tries to shape the story (which wasn’t included in the movie) says a lot, I think, on how sincere locals regarded how much off-base this movie’s story seemed, at least to some.
Social-realist (-cum-noir) aspect. First, not to dwell on an interesting area too much, director Granik in her Wikipedia bio is noted to have worked on films supportive of unions; not hard to understand, this relates to how Granik’s film reminds me of a sort of cultural-recording product of the Works Progress Administration (or Work Projects Administration, as it was later called) during the New Deal era—a photo or sound-recording record of local populations’ folk life, or even writing projects meant to employ artists in preserving, supporting, somehow celebrating, etc., folk art while also giving work to the artists doing this. Winter’s Bone has processed digital photography that heightens the black in the color scheme, so images have a more etched, austere quality. This is something of the effect seen in a sequence on native Brazilian fishermen (“Four Men on a Raft”) in It’s All True, an unfinished Orson Welles project of about 1942 that he did for the Roosevelt Administration, under its Good Neighbor policy: the sequence had a “social realist” documentary quality while using artful techniques, such as high-contrast photography.
This is all an esthetic aspect; whether Granik felt she was making a film reminiscent of WPA work is rather beside the point. What is more likely part of her philosophic disposition behind Winter’s Bone is feminism, also referenced in her Wikipedia bio. I will keep this point short: not that I am bluntly unsympathetic to this approach, I feel it is not necessary to endorse on it or harp on it to enjoy and value this film. In fact, I think you can “go along with it,” or overlook it, while it coheres well with other aspects of the film that I like or extol. I think one thing that may oversimplify whatever feminist “angle” one gets from this film is that Ree is presented as a sort of truncated figure; there is little of her past discussed much, and not much of a sense of her future (while she does hanker after the idea of joining the Army). She also has no boyfriend, which seems one of the more implausible features of the film as appreciated from a surface viewing: how could a Ree who looks like Lawrence
Meanwhile, Ree does have a female friend, Gail (which dimension of her life is treated extensively in the novel, as Granik says, but is truncated in the film). But does she have no leisure life? When Teardrop takes Ree with him for a night out at a bar, she merely sits in his truck, knit cap jammed on her head as she looks like a wintertime noodge. Ree is a sort of elf of a “minimal feminist”: she lacks a certain context that defines a richness of life, or being in a sense of personal time—with past and future—and this, to me—can it be?—is rather like the rudimentary standards expressed in old-time Communism, rather like the happy kolkhoz peasant being content to harvest potatoes for the good of the Motherland. Maybe I’m caricaturing this feminist angle; I will definitely come forward with more heartfelt observations when I talk about Lawrence
I personally found the cinematographer, Michael McDonough (complete with Irish accent), to be warmer and more interesting to listen to on the DVD during-the-film commentary than Granik. Granik showed she took the film’s story (and location-based elements) to heart, but there is something remote about her appreciation—she seems very much a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker or day-tripping city-living type (she came from the Washington, D.C., area), almost as if in assembling this touching story, she was like a dry-eyed technician working for National Geographic making a documentary among the exotic stuff in Africa. Mr. McDonough has more technical things to say, but interested me more. Among other things, he points out how much Lawrence
Touching symbolism in a dream. The dream sequence—when Ree is sleeping under the influence of a narcotic painkiller following the beating she got at the Miltons
Religious symbolism? Lawrence Lawrence
Career prospects for Lawrence
Every notable actress I tended to follow (more or less) in the immediately post-9/11 period ended up doing genre or superhero stuff. Natalie Portman did some Star Wars. Alison Lohman featured in a blue-screen version of Beowulf (about 2006). Kate Bosworth, who first made a splash (excuse the pun) in 2002’s surfing tale Blue Crush, ended up doing some Superman as Lois Lane. Evan Rachel Wood turned up in the fantasy-tinged Across the Universe, which I liked (and, notably, she dropped out of the hideously delayed stage version of Spider-man). So, every young actress of note, maybe in order to set up an annuity to support themselves in case marriage or Hollywood
Is Lawrence Hollywood Wehrmacht, lollygagging around in cinematic slobber, in spandex and makeup that takes eight hours to apply, until she’s too-soon past her prime?
One northeastern critic who gives Lawrence
Interestingly, as my end notes show, the bodies that issued the most nominations or wins for awards for director Granik and for Lawrence and John Hawkes were overwhelmingly from Southern, Midwestern, or Western regions. Lawrence seems not a favorite daughter of the New York
Amateur actor Ron Hall’s clue
Finally, when Ron “Stray Dog” Hall improvises a little speech he meant to figure in the beating-in-the-garage scene, this seems to me to reflect how some locals, especially the older ones who are not apt to whitewash whatever a movie production company might do in their neighborhood, didn’t quite like how dour a story was being made of his community. His Thump Milton Springfield
Well, Mr. Hall didn’t get his morally-rectifying Thump into the film, except via what was relegated to a DVD extra; the film’s producers were generous to include this. And it leads us to ask, how honest is this film (or the source novel) about southwestern Missouri
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End note 1 (some details here may need fixing).
According to her Wikipedia profile, all for Winter’s Bone, Granik was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which awards the Oscars) for awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; was nominated for Best Foreign Film by the body awarding the British Independent Film Awards; and was nominated under the Independent Spirit Awards for Best Feature, Best Screenplay (citing both her and producer Anne Rosellini). As for wins, she won the Prix du jury at the Deauville American Film Festival [of] 2010; won for Best Feature under the Gotham Independent Film Awards; and won, under the Seattle International Film Festival, the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director. Lastly, at the Sundance Film Festival, she won the Directing Award [for a] Dramatic [work: citing “Down to the Bone”?]; and won the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (citing her and Rosellini).
End note 2.
Lawrence won awards for earlier films, too: for her role in The Poker House (2008), via the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Outstanding Performance Award; and for her role in The Burning Plain, (2008), at Venice Film Festival, the Marcello Mastroianni Award.
End note 3.
Hawkes, according to the Wikipedia entry on him, was nominated for best supporting male actor (or the equivalent) by the following bodies: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which awards the Oscars); the Alliance of Women Film Journalists; the Chicago Film Critics Association; the Detroit Film Critics Society; the Indiana Film Critics Association; the Online Film Critics Society; the Screen Actors Guild; the St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association; the Utah Film Critics Association; the Vancouver Film Critics Circle; the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association; and the body that awards the Chlotrudis Award. The Wikipedia entry also suggests he was included (or referenced) in ensemble-type award nominations from the San Diego Film Critics Society and the Southeastern Film Critics Association. It also appears he won awards regarding “Best Ensemble” from the Detroit Film Critics Society and the Gotham Independent Film [society]. He won best supporting actor (or equivalent) awards from the Independent Spirit [awarding body], the San Diego Film Critics Society, and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle; and won the Virtuoso Award from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
