Winter's Bone

Based on the 2006 novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2010 on the strength of director Debra Granik's tense story of one family's fight to overcome crushing rural poverty and rampant drug use. Set in Missouri's Ozark Mountains, the film follows Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) as she searches for her methhead father who's put up the family home as bond collateral. The houses she visits are full of the everyday debris of life, and, along with a soundtrack of homespun melodies and prickly banjos, they soften a landscape of skeletal trees and overcast skies. As the Alice in a decidedly more adult Wonderland, Lawrence's calculatedly detached performance is the heart of the film. Her eventual break is all the more poignant because it reminds her, and the audience, that for all her burdens (two young siblings, a depressed mother), she is still just a teenager. There's a fine line between characterization and exploitation, and the film treads carefully by balancing depictions of substance abuse and poverty with deeply felt moments of loyalty; as Ree's casually violent uncle Teardrop, John Hawkes is a standout. Winter's Bone is less like a movie and more like a snapshot of a family's private pain, one that leaves the audience wondering about the next chapter in these characters' lives.