Of course I would recommend that you see this movie. I saw it over a week ago and have tried to think of a way write about it without being pedantic. I have to start with family and blood, for, to quote my great grandfather, they aren't something... they are everything in life.
Family and blood are why this movie is remarkable.
I once stood in the shade made by a grove of pecan trees just off a dirt road in Georgia. It was too hot to be in the house, so the men stood leaning against their pickups drinking sweet tea and smoking. The wives, aunts, nieces, and city girlfriends were in another patch of shade at the top of the rise that led down to the creek. When we were boys, the creek was where we found arrowheads and saw rattlesnakes as big as pythons.
My brother had brought his four-year-old son to meet his Southern relations for the first time, mindful of the chasm that lay between anything Boulder and everything Irwin County. We wore t-shirts, shorts, and athletic shoes and were fashionably tanned. All the other men, young and old, had on collared shirts, faded overalls, and thick-soled work shoes. There were harsh demarcation lines at their necks and biceps between burned red flesh and skin that had never seen the sun. They had never contemplated being foolish enough to go out in the hot sun for the purpose of 'tanning.'
The four year old stayed close to his father's legs, intimidated by the big-shouldered men with neck muscles that began flaring just below their ears. By how they talked back and forth in an indecipherable accent, punctuated with no shits, and, what the hells. It was nothing like what he had ever heard at Fred's. The buzzards circling above the north pasture, the bright red clay of the road, the way that the tin roofed old house leaned ten degrees, kept him quiet and subdued.
Another truck barreled down the road, kicking up a column of red dust that took a half hour to settle. Goddamn, Gary, one of the men shouted, goddamn it to hell! Cut that shit out. The truck stopped and my first cousin got out, tall, fierce, back from two or three tours in Vietnam, wearing dress pants and a white shirt, looking like he had come from being in court. Most likely not as a judge, juror, bailiff, or witness, but as a defendant. Another assault charge. He was having a hard time being back he had told me. Things got a little 'loose' over there and he had liked it.
His lawyer told to dress up so as not to look too guilty that day.
He was a very handsome man, rough looking, but not mean. A hard drinker, like his daddy, my uncle, and a man, again like his daddy, you did not want to cross.
Like the girl's uncle, Teardrop, in Winter's Bone.
He smiled at Greg and me, nodded to the rest of his uncles, and cousins and spotted little Brian.
"Greg," he shouted with absolute delight, "Is this here your boy Bryant?"
Before either of us could respond he rushed over and picked Brian up with his huge brown hands. He held him up high, dangling, just like John Wayne did with Natalie Wood in The Searchers.
"Bryant, you Greg's boy?" He asked almost quizzically, but seriously. Brian nodded.
"How are you son? Do you know me?" Brian didn't blink.
"You're my blood boy. You're a Jones. I love you!", he said even more fiercely to a boy he had never seen before.
"They ain't nothing in this world that will ever change that, and they ain't nothing you and your daddy or even that long haired hippy Mike there can do about it. I love you son. Wherever you live, what ever happens to you, there ain't nowhere I won't come save you."
And, then: "don't you ever forget that Brian." Pronouncing his name correctly. He put him down but kept holding his hand.
Brian didn't cry. He didn't even flinch. He looked like he had seen something he had never seen before, but he knew, for the rest of his life where he came from and who he was. That there was family that would love him and come, no matter what, if ever he needed them.
Ree Dolly goes looking for her meth addict father in the poverty stricken Ozarks of Missouri. Everybody she meets, every house she stands out in front of seeking help, is of her blood or people who know her blood. It's a ravaged landscape made so by its utter isolation, joblessness, despair, and drugs. It's filled with characters you meet in Springsteen songs, men with debts no honest man can pay.
She has an uncle who gets involved, her daddy's brother, played as true to the bone as any character you will see on the screen: Teardrop. From his first appearance on camera to the last, the camera can't take its eye off of him. An actor I don't know, John Hawkes, has got to win an Oscar for this performance.
The story is about a young girl forced to take matters into her own hands, in an exploration of the effect of drugs and violence on fierce vulnerable people. Ree Dolly, played by Jennifer Lawrence, stands outside a house high up in the hills. You can see her breath it is so cold. It has taken her hours to hike up those hills to get there, but she is implacable.
Inside the house is someone who might know where her daddy is. She asks for help, waits, and is rebuffed. It seems that this is not a simple case of a prison bound man ducking his date with the law. There's money involved, maybe lost and owed, outsiders seen with her father, burned meth factories, the sheriff...go away she is told, it ain't your business.
She doesn't leave. She is threatened with violence. She doesn't leave.
It's your last chance honey, a woman from the house says to her. A woman whose face, at a glance, tells more about life in meth ravaged rural America than any news article could ever describe. The true face of a hard life. How many men have hit that face, I wondered, seeing it? When was the last time that face relaxed and smiled at something funny? How many men have ever said anything sweet to that woman? Or ever opened a door for her or stood when she left the table?
It's that kind of movie.
Hey! The young girl, Ree Dolly, yells at the house. Don't you know who I am? Ain't you supposed to be blood of mine? That's supposed to make a difference, here, ain't it?
The winter's landscape, bleak and colorless, surrounds her, making her seem even younger than her years, and more vulnerable so far from home. The cold wind felt in the theater.
You're kin, she shouts. You can't make me wait out here and threaten me.
Later, after a savage beating, she looks at the circle of big men and mean women and, only seventeen years old, says, and she means every word: you might as well kill me, but I ain't stopping.
Then there's Ree's uncle, her daddy's brother, Teardrop. We meet him as treats her like a dog he'd like to shoot but winds up, like Hamlet, doing what blood requires.
John Hawkes, as Teardrop, is a revelation. He has a way of carrying himself in this movie, he has that look, of someone you do not want to mess with. He makes other men walk softly about him and consider carefully what they say to him. Women are afraid of him too, with good reason. He's not big, has no muscles or fancy karate moves nor a badass attitude. People know he is a Dolly, they've known him his whole life, boy and man. They know what he is capable of. I don't know what acting technique Mr. Hawkins has mastered to do all of that, you can't see how he does it, but you won't forget Teardrop.
There were several Teardrops leaning against pickups in the shade back when Brian met his second cousin for the first time.
There is a scene of a confrontation between Ree, Teardrop, and the law that is about as perfect as a movie can get.
Winter's Bone is not without humor. It's not an unpleasant experience just a real one amid 3-D blockbusters and multimillion dollar action flicks.
It is a fierce story about some determined people. Not so much about good and evil, or the triumph of the rule of law, but of family and blood, courage, and who will come when you need them most.
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