Winter’s Bone

A bleak,impoverished stretch of the Ozarks is the setting for the darkly compellingdrama Winter’s Bone. In a Southerngothic worthy of Flannery O’Connor, a teenage girl, Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), isdetermined to keep her family from “being put out in the field like dogs.”Their cabin and land are about to be seized after Ree’s ne’er-do-well pa, thecrank dealer Jessup, jumped bail. The rumor in the woods is that rival drugrunners murdered him. Ree can stave off the eviction only by finding his bones.

Directedby Debra Granik, Winter’s Bone is asympathetic look at the human condition in contemporary rural America, adesperate country in the grip of methamphetamine. Ree’s mother has retreatedinto catatonic depression; Ree’s younger siblings depend on her and thekindness of neighbors. “Never ask for what ought to be offered,” she tells herbrother in a bit of weird old Calvinist wisdom.

Butoffers of help are hard to come by when Ree sets forth on an odyssey throughthe chilly gray woods in search of her lost father. With the impending calamityof eviction hanging over her head, and signs of the covert crank trade allaround, she finds hard faces and threats among the drug-addled and strainedties of kinship. “Some of our blood is at least the sameain’t that s’posed tomean something?” she demands of a cousin, a woman who resembles one of thewitches from Macbeth. Theplain-spoken dialogue sometimes rises to an almost Shakespearean cadence,endowing rough-hewn speakers with dignity.

Toxinsleaking from the meth labs have poisoned the land where Ree searches for herpa, and the menfolk, heavily armed and addicted, have grown suspicious andmean-spirited. Yet, Winter’s Bone isultimately a hopeful story about the resilience of the human spirit and thefeeble light of goodness that can sometimes be discerned in the hardest people.

Opens July 30 at theOriental Theatre.