Movies like this one are becoming their own sort of genre. They're quiet and sad and deal with people on the verge of death or breakdown (see: That Evening Sun, Frozen River). This film is about a seventeen year old girl (a sublime Jennifer Lawrence) in the Ozarks who has to take care of two much younger siblings. Her parents are absent. The mother is insane--practically catatonic, and her father has skipped out on his bail bond after imprisonment for cooking meth. In order to keep her house, which the father has put up as the bond, Lawrence must find her father. But trouble is afoot, for there's a mafia-esque quality to the white trash of the Ozarks: all the men cook meth and all the women stay out of their way. The landscape is devastating, it's cold and dark, it isn't a town and it looks like its been simmering there for hundreds of years.
The strength in Winter's Bone is in the characters, for they seem to have been absent from American movies until now, finally breaking out. Perhaps these were the same tough-as-nails characters in the old westerns, but in this time are crazy meth dealing sons-of-bitches. They are fucking scary. And very well acted. The grittiness of these characters is what's so surprising, and how they try to corrupt Lawrence (whose performance is also wonderful).
Winter's Bone: ★★★★
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