Winter's Bone [118 points / 14 votes]
"Despite all of its plaudits during awards season, I feel the need to defend Winter's Bone against a charge I keep hearing levied at it: that it’s just another Sundance-feted minstrel show, depicting those poor flyover state slobs and their beautifully ugly, inconsequential lives. Certainly, on paper at least, all of the elements of those “hix pix” that the “sticks nix” are here.
However, like Jeff Nicholl’s Shotgun Stories before it, Bone transcends any potential pandering rednexploitation by exercising impressive formal control and simply keeping itself very, very weird. Deborah Granik approaches Daniel Woodrell’s “country noir” as a folk or fairy tale rather than a piece of ethnography. Cinematographer Michael McDonough frames the Ozark hinterlands as hazy blue-gray wastes that are more akin to Werner Herzog’s Eastern Europe in Nosferatu the Vampyre than the sun-dappled Americana of, say, Sling Blade.
Ree Dolly’s quest to find her father takes her through coded interactions with redneck chieftains, skittish meth heads, and her spectral uncle Teardrop. Granik pares Woodrell’s already tight prose down, giving these exchanges a cadence that’s hard-boiled, poetic, and (yes) a little folksy. What keeps all of this from feeling affected is the film’s preference for storytelling over message-mongering. Thanks to Jennifer Lawrence’s taciturn performance, we’re never asked to view Ree as an object of pity. Rather, we end up infected with her obsession to pursue the mystery to its horrifying end." - Philip Tatler
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