Winter's Bone opens with a young boy riding a skateboard, a young girl playing with a doll, and a slightly older girl doing laundry, set to a presumably traditional Ozark folksong, all taking place in what becomes a familiar setting of a dilapidated, broke down trailer home. The scene combines the universal (kids playing), with some of the unique aspects of this particular story (the Ozark culture and the decrepit conditions its people endure), and brilliantly sets the tone for rest of the movie.
Besides the acclaimed, outstanding, surely soon to be Oscar nominated performance from Jennifer Lawrence, what stood out most in Winter's Bone was the bleak, hopeless atmosphere. The film really had a cinema verite feel, so the story felt real, like it was a situation that you could easily imagine happening often in that part of the world, or at least some variation of it. Set against this gloomy backdrop, a 17 year old girl was just trying to do what she could to keep her family together. I'm already a sucker for stories about kids being raised by slightly older kids (think Wallace or Michael in The Wire), so watching Lawrence's character fearlessly navigate the Ozark drug underworld was quite an experience. The patriarchal nature of that society, where it seemed it was a man's right to aggressively grab a young girl's face whenever he wanted to tell her something, made that experience even more harrowing.
I briefly complained about family relationships being hard to trace in The Fighter but that was a piece of cake compared to this film. That minor quibble aside, Winter's Bone was a compelling, character driven story that showed that a pervasive culture of drugs and violence has ruined more places in America than the inner city. It's a should-see (a notch below must-see in my book) for Lawrence's performance alone.
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