Traversing Ozark culture in search of her dad

June 18, 2010|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

The gritty, desperate Ozarks milieu of “Winter’s Bone’’ feels so real, so right, that you only slowly realize you’re watching a detective movie. It’s those noir bones that give this social-realist drama its punch, as if Humphrey Bogart had been recast as a 17-year-old girl and dropped into the poorest corner of America.

The setting may seem familiar if you saw last year’s estimable art-house hit “Frozen River.’’ Same numbing poverty, same hard women and no-account men holding on by their fingernails in shacks and trailers on rutted back roads. The people in “Winter’s Bone’’ are meaner, though, and more proudly, even criminally, reclusive. They’re umpteenth-generation mountain folk, but the moonshine stills have given way to meth labs, and the revenuers are now sheriffs in sleek county police cars.

The place of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) in this society is set: She’s a woman, so she’s meant to take whatever comes, and she’s still a kid, so she doesn’t matter. But her mother has left the building — present in body, she’s a vacant shell of a woman — and the two little ones, brother and sister, need caring for. So Ree chops the wood and feeds the kids and holds the family together because that’s what you do. She’s pretty but probably not for much longer.

There’s a dad, Jessup, but he’s nowhere to be found, and the sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) is looking for him because a court date is coming up. If he fails to show, the county takes the house, so Ree embarks on a search that takes her deeper and higher into her brutal, closed-off community than she’s ever meant to go.

The men here have names like Little Arthur and Thump Milton, and they won’t be spoken to by a girl. Instead, their women deal with Ree, warn her off, and administer the occasional beating. Dale Dickey, as Merab, the clan’s queen bee, emerges as a dead-faced figure of violence and Olympian judgment. Like any good film noir hero, Ree takes it and keeps on coming, burrowing steadily toward the mystery of her father’s whereabouts. She doesn’t earn respect so much as convince the others of the self-respect she already has.