Winter's Bone: Where's My Daddy?

in the most highly acclaimed independent film of 2010, the main character has to ask a lot of people where her dad is. if she doesn't find him, her house is gone, and she and the kids are on the street (er, i mean, "in the field like dogs.") finally, someone tells her where he is. she gets money. the end.

here's the authenticity of the Ozarks: cars in lawns, trash in lawns, trash on porches, rusty trampolines, no cell phones!, grim faces, eating squirrel, cooking meth, speaking in accents, woods.

here's the twist: it's noir-realism, in the Ozarks.

here's the danger: every character feels, looks, acts like every other character. mean-faced and humorless. what's worse: we're not dealing with characters here, we're dealing with character types. the lead, jennifer lawrence, has the most convincing "character," which at the very least has some hopes and aspirations and, you know, a body and hair and clothes. everyone else in the movie might as well be mindless, serving her either dutifully or scornfully in the film's slow and sometimes overly dialogue-driven plot (Looking for my dad, hey, need to talk to him, need to talk with him, really do) Note: a slight exception can be made for John Hawkes, who brings some life and a bit of humor to an otherwise empty role.

the thing about Winter's Bone is not that it's unconvincing, not that it tries too hard for a kind of realism, and not even that it's going for a kind of noir take on this story. it's failing is that it feels rather mundane: we're supposed to want this girl to find her dead dad's bones so she can stay on her land; we're supposed to follow her initiation into this "world" of her father's. problem is, we don't know her dad, we barely know her, and that makes it hard to care; secondly, this world, while seeming somewhat dangerous, isn't all that interesting. so, her dad cooks meth, so what? so, wait, mean people are associated with this world...of course they are. there is talk of "kin" and these people seem to adhere to different codes than the "kin" code, but all of that is small. worse, the emotional resonance of Winter's Bone is lacking. we do see reasons to cheer for Lawrence's character (I can't even remember her name), but none of them are surprising; all the reasons are cliched. we see the dangerous world she's entering, but none of it is surprising; most of the people here do the cliched things we expect them to do. this is Winter's Bone major failing: it takes an interesting situation, a terrific setting, and the possibility of some great characters, and instead of doing something unique and exciting, it gives us a paint-by-numbers noir piece.

finally, a spoiler alert: in the end, Winter's Bone almost feels vapid - a movie in which the exact problem we started with was solved almost perfectly (even better, she's handed a bag of money!). here's another cliche: for my money, give me Blue Valentine; or, if we want to get sort rustic, how about Old Joy or Wendy and Lucy; or even Junebug - all of these films decide to do the thing that great independent movies should: surprise at every turn and rip our hearts apart over and over in myriad small ways.