Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Garret Dillahunt; unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacking through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact
I’ve been thinking a lot about Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) which makes the Ozarks look a bit like Afghanistan – and I mean in terms of living conditions, not the landscape. … tho both have ice.
Peter Travers:
Every once in a rare while a movie gets inside your head and heart, rubbing your emotions raw. The remarkable Winter’s Bone is just such a movie. Having won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, plus the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, Winter’s Bone faces the challenge of finding an audience in a blizzard of multiplex crap. This story of a dirt-poor Ozark family may just be the antidote to the designer porn of Sex and the City 2. Rolling Stone.
Roger Ebert:
The script, by Granik and Anne Rosellini, based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, uses the ancient form of an odyssey. At its end will be Ree's father, dead or alive. Most likely dead, she begins to conclude, but unless there is a body, her family will be homeless and torn apart. She treks through a landscape scarcely less ruined than the one in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This land seems post-catastrophe. Although it has cars and electricity, running shoes and kitchens, cigarettes and televisions, these seem like relics of an earlier, prosperous time. If thrown-away possessions pile up around the houses of people, it is because they've reached the end of the line. There is no next stop.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 8 March, 2017 | Now: 25 November, 2022