[film review] Winter's Bone
Tuesday, 1 May 2012 15:40![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extemporally(I know I'm posting a lot lately... sorry. Bear with it, and I promise I'll pipe down once I'm well enough to be up and about doing Actual People Things again!)
So, the Cherwell! I have mixed feelings about the Cherwell. In my opinion, it is a perfectly average student publication with some perfectly awful writing. That's what happens when you have students writing towards a deadline, and that's not even for their degree. Added to which, that awful (student) journo tendency to believe earnestly that Every Situation Has Two Sides To It (And Only Two Sides), Ever, and sometimes stomach-turning moral equivalence is the result, with extra doses of uneven irony. On the other hand, look at the list of past contributors! Evelyn Waugh! W.H. Auden! Graham Greene! It is an embarrassing habit of mine, to go weak at the knees at such dead white male prestige.Shut up there's a reason I go here.
Anyway, that needlessly long ramble was to say that Sometimes I write for it, and Sometimes I get published. Seeing your name in print is endlessly satisfying. And sometimes, I do not get published, and since the world does not exactly have a black-market level demand for reviews of Winter's Bone, though they should, I am posting my rejected (the sub-editor didn't even get back to me, How Rude!) piece here.
And the thing is. I have seen it three times, okay? That is how much I love Winter's Bone. I don't even know that I am particularly critical here. But it is a wonderful film, and Jennifer Lawrence is prodigious in it, and here is my clumsy, inarticulate attempt to explain why:
Initially, it is easy to interpret Winter’s Bone as a real-life, indie version of The Hunger Games: the recent blockbuster which has achieved the largest box-office opening weekend in history, and which has catapulted its star Jennifer Lawrence to international attention. Before Jennifer Lawrence became known as ‘the most promising young actress in America’, however, she appeared here in an outing that gained her a Best Actress nomination in the 2010 Oscars. As Ree Dolly, a 17 year-old living in the Ozark region of the USA, she wrangles her siblings and takes on all the family responsibilities of her family as her mother stares unreactively into space, catatonic. Her father is missing, possibly dead. For his bail, he left the house and timber land up onto his bail bond, before failing to turn up for his court date. Ree faces the prospect of her family becoming dispossessed if she does not find her father, and so begins the plot.
Any comparisons to The Hunger Games grow increasingly pointless: where Katniss Everdeen treks out into the magnified arena of the Hunger Games, Ree Dolly makes an internal journey of sorts: deep into the bowels of her Ozark community; disrupted by meth production and consumption, where everyone is related, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. As she makes her trek from door to door, finally ending outside the house of feared local crime boss, Thump Milton, it seems that everyone answering her knock already knows what she has to ask and cannot, or will not, help her.
Here, Jennifer Lawrence is in top acting form, straining her guts to give the kind of performance that would have you in a constant state of awe if it wasn’t so convincing she makes even the most hardened critic believe that she is Ree. Her facial expressions render comparisons to Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose completely justified, and her timing is killer. At one point, bruised and bloody, she struggles to prop herself up as her attackers hover over her. “Oh, baby girl, what are we going to do with you?” one of them croons. Lawrence shrugs with that perfect combination of nonchalance, resignation, and sheer pain. “Kill me, I guess.” In one of the most memorable lines in the film, the reply comes damningly: “That idea has already been said.” “Help me, then,” Lawrence fires back, spitting equal parts blood and vitriol. “Ain’t nobody said that idea yet, have they?” It is an exchange that summarises all the best qualities of her performance; nay, the entire film. Additionally I am no expert, but to my ear Jennifer Lawrence’s accent seems exactly on point.
Though bleak, the film is beautiful – beautifully acted, beautifully shot, and beautifully scored by the folk music that sings through the very veins of the film. Cinematographer Michael McDonagh’s chiaroscuro fascination is edgy, artistic and alive without feeling self-conscious or self-indulgent, serving at some points to narrate rather than detract from the physicality of certain scenes. Its interspersed light-and-dark composition serves as an apt metaphor for the self-described country noir: down to the last crushing, awful “I know who”, and the way the sunlight glances off the strings of a banjo, in the closing scene of the film.
So, the Cherwell! I have mixed feelings about the Cherwell. In my opinion, it is a perfectly average student publication with some perfectly awful writing. That's what happens when you have students writing towards a deadline, and that's not even for their degree. Added to which, that awful (student) journo tendency to believe earnestly that Every Situation Has Two Sides To It (And Only Two Sides), Ever, and sometimes stomach-turning moral equivalence is the result, with extra doses of uneven irony. On the other hand, look at the list of past contributors! Evelyn Waugh! W.H. Auden! Graham Greene! It is an embarrassing habit of mine, to go weak at the knees at such dead white male prestige.
Anyway, that needlessly long ramble was to say that Sometimes I write for it, and Sometimes I get published. Seeing your name in print is endlessly satisfying. And sometimes, I do not get published, and since the world does not exactly have a black-market level demand for reviews of Winter's Bone, though they should, I am posting my rejected (the sub-editor didn't even get back to me, How Rude!) piece here.
And the thing is. I have seen it three times, okay? That is how much I love Winter's Bone. I don't even know that I am particularly critical here. But it is a wonderful film, and Jennifer Lawrence is prodigious in it, and here is my clumsy, inarticulate attempt to explain why:
Initially, it is easy to interpret Winter’s Bone as a real-life, indie version of The Hunger Games: the recent blockbuster which has achieved the largest box-office opening weekend in history, and which has catapulted its star Jennifer Lawrence to international attention. Before Jennifer Lawrence became known as ‘the most promising young actress in America’, however, she appeared here in an outing that gained her a Best Actress nomination in the 2010 Oscars. As Ree Dolly, a 17 year-old living in the Ozark region of the USA, she wrangles her siblings and takes on all the family responsibilities of her family as her mother stares unreactively into space, catatonic. Her father is missing, possibly dead. For his bail, he left the house and timber land up onto his bail bond, before failing to turn up for his court date. Ree faces the prospect of her family becoming dispossessed if she does not find her father, and so begins the plot.
Any comparisons to The Hunger Games grow increasingly pointless: where Katniss Everdeen treks out into the magnified arena of the Hunger Games, Ree Dolly makes an internal journey of sorts: deep into the bowels of her Ozark community; disrupted by meth production and consumption, where everyone is related, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. As she makes her trek from door to door, finally ending outside the house of feared local crime boss, Thump Milton, it seems that everyone answering her knock already knows what she has to ask and cannot, or will not, help her.
Here, Jennifer Lawrence is in top acting form, straining her guts to give the kind of performance that would have you in a constant state of awe if it wasn’t so convincing she makes even the most hardened critic believe that she is Ree. Her facial expressions render comparisons to Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose completely justified, and her timing is killer. At one point, bruised and bloody, she struggles to prop herself up as her attackers hover over her. “Oh, baby girl, what are we going to do with you?” one of them croons. Lawrence shrugs with that perfect combination of nonchalance, resignation, and sheer pain. “Kill me, I guess.” In one of the most memorable lines in the film, the reply comes damningly: “That idea has already been said.” “Help me, then,” Lawrence fires back, spitting equal parts blood and vitriol. “Ain’t nobody said that idea yet, have they?” It is an exchange that summarises all the best qualities of her performance; nay, the entire film. Additionally I am no expert, but to my ear Jennifer Lawrence’s accent seems exactly on point.
Though bleak, the film is beautiful – beautifully acted, beautifully shot, and beautifully scored by the folk music that sings through the very veins of the film. Cinematographer Michael McDonagh’s chiaroscuro fascination is edgy, artistic and alive without feeling self-conscious or self-indulgent, serving at some points to narrate rather than detract from the physicality of certain scenes. Its interspersed light-and-dark composition serves as an apt metaphor for the self-described country noir: down to the last crushing, awful “I know who”, and the way the sunlight glances off the strings of a banjo, in the closing scene of the film.