First let me say that I liked Winter’s Bone, the
adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name by Debra
Granik, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Anne
Rosellini, though I thought it needn’t have been so somber and
depressing as it was. This was because the tone was not quite
rightly judged, I think. Essentially, the movie gives us a
woman’s — if not quite an explicitly feminist — perspective on
what is represented, probably with some accuracy, as the
patriarchal male honor culture of the Missouri Ozarks. But the
result is almost unremittingly grim and miserable and so runs the
risk of compromising that accuracy by making it look too much
like a feminist caricature. Although I have no idea of Ms.
Granik’s political views, she could hardly have made a movie more
dark and depressing if she occupied an honored place among the
sternest sort of that’s-not-funny! feminists.
There are some rather half-hearted attempts in the movie to
lighten this darkness. In one or two scenes we see these wild
mountain men forget their propensity for violence long enough to
engage in music-making along with the women who, for the moment,
cease looking depressed and resentful of their lot in life. But
these scenes are not enough to add any significant shading of
gray to an otherwise starkly black-and-white representation of
this bleak and frightening world. The mountain-man’s honor
culture is doubtless a throwback and considerably debased from
the time — only seventy years or so ago, as you can see from
Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York of 1941 — when it bore
some relation to a national honor culture, but even today it
would be an exaggeration to say that either the women or the men
are prisoners of their ancient habits of clannishness and
deference to paternal authority. The patriarchy could not have
held on for so many centuries if it were the tyranny the
feminists believe it to be. There must be good as well as bad in
it.
There is a hint of this good, too, in the pride Ms.
Granik’s heroine, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence),
takes in her family’s honor when a bail bondsman (Tate Taylor)
appears at her door to tell her that her father, Jessup, charged
with “cooking” methamphetamines, has put their house up as bail
and then disappeared. If he doesn’t show up for his trial, she is
told, she, her mother and siblings will lose their home. Ree, who
has no income and whose mother is non compos mentis, is the only
person able to look after her younger brother (Isaiah Stone) and
sister (Ashlee Thompson). Yet she has not the slightest doubt
that her father must be dead or he would have showed up. “I’m a
Dolly, bred and buttered, and that’s how I know he’s dead,” she
confidently says.
She is thus appealing to the same standard of honor of
which she immediately becomes the victim. For when she turns for
help in finding her father — or his body — to a succession of
friends and relatives with little success, all assure her that
there are powerful forces engaged in his disappearance, and she
were best to shut up about it and submit to her fate. Gradually,
we learn that Jessup has committed the unpardonable sin in this
harsh and unforgiving world based on honor. He has informed on
his fellow drug-manufacturers, including members of his own
extended family, rather than go to jail. As Ree’s uncle Teardrop
(John Hawkes) informs her, “He loved you all. That’s why he went
weak.”
There, I think, the film puts a foot wrong. It seems most
unlikely that, for some bizarre but unspecified reason, Jessup
would have thought he could somehow escape the inevitable
retribution that everyone else in the movie automatically assumes
is the lot of the snitch. In real life, if he had put love for
his family first he would have known that they would be better
taken care of if he had gone to jail and kept his mouth shut.
That, much more than the murder or intimidation of witnesses, is
why it is always so hard to get a conviction in these honor-based
family businesses. All the same, I think it worth looking past
this false rendering if you are fully to appreciate what the
movie has to offer.
This is mainly its portrait of Ree, who is one of the most
impressive female characters to be seen in the movies in recent
years. She is heroic and yet entirely believable partly because
she is not given to political preachments or judgments against
the society in which she lives. Ree would not have been
believable as a feminist revolutionary; instead, she is simply —
simply! — a brave and determined young woman trying to keep her
home and her family together in a world neither she nor we can
imagine being other than it is. In doing so, she has to stand up
to the hostility of the family patriarch, “Thump” Milton (Ronnie
Hall), and the many other family members — including, at first,
even her Uncle Teardrop — who are terrified of him and so win
his and their grudging acceptance.
Teardrop is ultimately inspired by her example to his own
possibly fatal defiance of the family code of honor and so helps
to bring about a compromise solution to the problem of what is to
be done about Jessup’s family, albeit one involving yet more
horror for Ree. Yet in some ways I think the movie would have
been better if her singular bravery and strength of character had
been just a little less singular and a little more like that of
the honorable society as she imagines it to be when she explains
her scarcely believable actions by repeating to the bail bondsman
at the end that she is a Dolly “bred and buttered, like I told
you.”
