Winter's Bone

Even when I’m not getting to the theater as much as I’d like, I still seem to find movies like Winter’s Bone. And movies like Winter’s Bone are the reason why I see movies like Winter’s Bone ... sure that makes sense. This will easily be one of the best films I see in 2010.

This was just about a flawless film. Winter’s Bone is a very simple story about a daughter searching for her deadbeat father. But that sentence does not do justice to the world that Ree Dolly lives in and navigates. It's always fun to experience a place that just never shows up in major motion pictures. The world of Winter’s Bone is a small town in the Ozark mountains and that does not seem to be a wholesome place to grow up in. Not only is it really cold but also there is some sort of redneck mafia that makes life really difficult. Ree needs to find her meth-cooking father so the courts don’t take the house the family lives in. And the people she deals with are just a murderer’s row of memorable faces and I mean that literally their faces were memorable. Of course it doesn’t get better than her uncle with the name Teardrop. Beautiful. In the end she runs afoul of the meth-cooking mafia gets her ass kicked, stands tall, and keeps her family together by any means necessary.

Jennifer Lawrence portrays Ree Dolly and she better get a nomination for her work. She carries this entire movie on her back. Jennifer goes toe-to-toe with every other actor in the film and never fails to deliver. She morphs from caregiver with her mother, brother, and sister to hardass with her uncle and lower level thugs and finishes off with scared but determined in the climatic scenes. Look I’ve held back as much as possible, but Garret fucking Dillahunt! The man plays the yellow-bellied sheriff and he is fantastic as usual. His final scene with Ree is just perfectly played. And if Garret isn’t enough, John Hawkes is the second lead as her uncle, Teardrop. Perfect. He is just on the edge in every one of his scenes. Hawkes is both terrifying and heartbreaking as he tries to deal with the realization why his brother was killed.

Winter's Bone was a phenomenal independent movie. That is all I really need to say on the matter.

9 out of 10