Winter's Bone 2010
This is one of those classic indie movies that they can make on a shoestring budget. For the most part the whole movie is the lead character and the setting she is in. The lead is a teenaged girl in the Ozarks taking care of her younger siblings now that her mother’s mind is gone and her meth-cooking father has disappeared. Her father has put their property up for bond and now has skipped town, meaning the family he has left behind will soon lose what very little they have. So she decides to find him, braving the Ozarks underworld. It is a bleak story and gets bleaker as it goes along. The pace is slow, but the central character is very good, as well as all of the side characters she runs into along the way. The most prominent thing in the movie is this world of dirt poor people who only seem to make money by selling each other drugs. Making an honest living is just ridiculously hard. This makes it a good portrait of people barely hanging on during tough times that is definitely worth watching. While not terribly uplifting, it at least supplies a not entirely tragic ending that leaves the viewer with some hope intact. The young actress in the lead, Jennifer Lawrence, does a great job with this very meaty role, for which she received an Oscar nomination along with the script and the movie itself.
Written: 18 Dec 2011
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital