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Winter's Bone (2010)
directed by Debra Granik
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Winter's Bone reminded me of what I liked most about Ballast, another film about poor people in rural America: winter weather. Ballast took place in the Mississippi Delta, and Winter's Bone is set in the Ozarks of Missouri, where new graves stand out as "humps that ain't settled." It bothered me that the writer and director of Ballast was a white guy; Debra Granik was raised in Massachusetts and educated at NYU.
Like Lance Hammer, she is interested in the beauty of southern landscapes. Meth is prevalent in Winter's Bone but not central to the plot, whereas the blackness of Hammer's protagonists in Ballast very much was. But it's not like John Ford grew up on a ranch in Arizona, and Granik's film is as much about absent fathers as using a chainsaw to remove both hands from a corpse.
I wish more movies spent time in places like Missouri and Mississippi. I like the gunshots you hear, far off in the forest, and the way you wonder if it's a hunting party or something worse that's responsible for them. I like how Granik treats hills and hollows like fiefdoms in England - areas of land one can cross in a day, controlled by kings who see their property lines as the ends of the earth. Everyone in Winter's Bone is family, from Sheryl Lee to John Hawkes, and that graveyard and its long-buried dead are spooky by flashlight, even among friends.
directed by Debra Granik
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Winter's Bone reminded me of what I liked most about Ballast, another film about poor people in rural America: winter weather. Ballast took place in the Mississippi Delta, and Winter's Bone is set in the Ozarks of Missouri, where new graves stand out as "humps that ain't settled." It bothered me that the writer and director of Ballast was a white guy; Debra Granik was raised in Massachusetts and educated at NYU.
Like Lance Hammer, she is interested in the beauty of southern landscapes. Meth is prevalent in Winter's Bone but not central to the plot, whereas the blackness of Hammer's protagonists in Ballast very much was. But it's not like John Ford grew up on a ranch in Arizona, and Granik's film is as much about absent fathers as using a chainsaw to remove both hands from a corpse.
I wish more movies spent time in places like Missouri and Mississippi. I like the gunshots you hear, far off in the forest, and the way you wonder if it's a hunting party or something worse that's responsible for them. I like how Granik treats hills and hollows like fiefdoms in England - areas of land one can cross in a day, controlled by kings who see their property lines as the ends of the earth. Everyone in Winter's Bone is family, from Sheryl Lee to John Hawkes, and that graveyard and its long-buried dead are spooky by flashlight, even among friends.
posted by NPK at 12:15 AM
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