Whilst watching Winter's Bone, Debra Gronik's blistering adaptation of the novel by Daniel Woodrell, I kept comparing it to David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Not because they are similar in style or tone - there couldn't be a greater difference between the digital, handheld realism of Winter's Bone and Lynch's Hitchcockian composition - but because both films display an intuitive understanding how their respective communities work, and the ways in which cruelty and kindness, beauty and brutality, co-exist and can sometimes be embodied in the same person.
Both films are also, to an extent, about the way in which a young innocent is changed and brutalized by their descent into an underworld that they don't understand. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is less jejune than Jeffrey Beaumont, though, as we discover very early on. At just 17, Ree is already responsible for the well-being of her family, who live in a rickety cabin in a remote part of the Ozark mountains of Missouri. Her father is a crystal meth cook who spends much of his time in prison, her mother is sick, and Ree's younger sister and brother are too young to care for themselves. With no money, they rely largely on the kindness of their neighbors to get by, even having to give up the family horse so that she'll get fed.
If Ree's existence wasn't hardscrabble enough, the story really starts to turn the screws when she learns that her father has gone missing after putting the family house up as part of his bail bond. If he doesn't make his court date, the house will be repossessed by the county and Ree and her family will be kicked out. Since the police don't have any leads, and don't seem to care that much either way, Ree starts asking questions of the reprobates and drug dealers that comprise her extended family in order to discover the truth. But her family members don't like talking because talking only creates witnesses, and witnesses can easily disappear under the Ozark snow.
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