Natalie Portman, Annette Bening, and Julianne Moore have already established themselves as Best Actress contenders, but we can now add Jennifer Lawrence to the race as well for her performance in Winter’s Bone, a glimpse at how poverty not only constrains people economically, but also socially in a rural area where everyone’s struggle for survival is individualistic and biting the hand that feeds you literally leads to starvation.
Ree Dolly (Lawrence) is a seventeen-year old girl in the Ozark Mountains who is tasked with taking care of her two younger siblings as well as her depressed mother, who is often more catatonic than lucid. As with the rest of Winter’s Bone, there is chilling realism to her mother’s depression, and it’s not overplayed; instead, it’s subdued, exploring the conflict between familial obligation (caring for a catatonic, hardly lucid, yet living parent) and individual survival where hypothermia and starvation lurk within your shadow. The mother “is,” and Ree doesn’t visibly seem conflicted, but with every moment her mother spends dancing on the edge of sedation, the viewer wonders why Ree hasn’t absconded. The same subtlety is employed by director Debra Granik when handling Lee’s younger siblings. They don’t scream and cry. They don’t blatantly state how hungry they are, but this is told through the meager amount of food cooked in the morning. Winter’s Bone could be exaggerated poverty porn, driving us to find Sally Struthers asking for donations, but it isn’t.
The main conflict of Winter’s Bone comes when the sheriff informs Ree that her often-absent father has put their house up for collateral on his bail bond, which he has yet to pay back. Adding to the matter, Ree’s father has disappeared, and even his brother Teardrop has suggested that he’s dead in a ditch somewhere. However, without a body, the bail bond is still valid, so the house remains on the verge of repossession. Knowing that her father is in the meth-manufacturing business and involved in the local drug trade, Ree visits his local haunts, employers, and customers to find either him or his body.
There is an additional thematic narrative here that plays off of the previous conflict between family and survival in that Ree’s concern is not whether her father is alive, but rather that he is currency to dissolve the bail bond. Alive or dead, his body has a price associated with it, and as opposed to her mother and her siblings, Ree has ostracized her father from the family unit, relegating him to a pawn. Perhaps this is because he’s a reprobate, but there are plenty of those in this film that are still deeply tied to their family. Rather, his ostracism is a result of his abandoning his family. Leaving the collective unit to strike out on his own individualist endeavors breaks a social code and places his loyalty in the hands of other criminals who use him as a supplier, an additional form of currency.
Herein resides an additional conflict. If Ree’s father is alive, he will hardly turn himself over to the cops, and his existence as a drug distributor benefits a number of other members in the drug trade. If he is re-incarcerated, they are in danger. At the same time, his dead body more than likely results from murder, so it puts all those associated with him in danger because of a potential investigation, and this is what makes Ree’s journey through this social underworld so precarious. While she’s acting as a means of survival, like anyone else in the community would, her survival potentially impedes the survival of others by cutting off their livelihoods, whether it is through snuffing the drug supply or leading investigators to the breadwinners of each clan.
This trek illustrates a refreshing “survival narrative” because the viewer is only ever told so much. There is very little revealed at the end aside from the fate of Lee’s father, and even that is murky. (No pun intended when you see the film.) We know what ultimately happens to her father, but the how and why left untold, and truthfully, it doesn’t take away from the tale. We also don’t know what will happen to the nearly-catatonic mother or the hungry siblings. The film is transient, obviating a happy ending – or a sad one – and focusing on Lee and her quest to secure shelter until the next travesty.
DYL MAG Score: 8
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