Review of Winter's Bone (2010) by Shiira — 16 Sep 2010

Drug money bought those little ones that trampoline; drug money bought the hay for the horse, the potatoes, the laundry blowing in the wind, the squirrel gun, the deer gun, the derelict house that mom never vacuums, the plot of land, as everything under Ree Dolly's Ozark sky, rest assured, was paid with her missing father's money he had earned from his meth lab.

Welcome to "The O.M.", holmes, where the **** drive pickup trucks and will beat your lily white ass if you poke around where you're not welcome. Adapted from the Daniel Woodrell novel, "Winter's Bone" is film noir gone hillbilly, a noir with clotheslines instead of venetian blinds, femmes milking cows instead of femme fatales; it's a "white trash" Nancy Drew mystery, the story of a teenaged girl's search for her dad, feared dead, in the rural hood of the Ozarks.

But that's half the movie; that's just the trappings of genre, hard-boiled...eggs, farm fresh, shadows cast by livestock, a nightmare propagated from iniquitous circumstances, the bedrock which is fundamental to any film noir, regardless of geography.

And yet it doesn't take a detective to diagnose the real nightmare, the socio-economic nightmare of poverty, as it's the latter-half of the genre binary(the genre associated with real locations and real people) that's the galvanizing force which coalesces the tropes of noir with the tropes of neo-realism.

When categorizing "Winter's Bone", the moviegoer might want to start with ethnography, albeit it's a faux one, since some of the actors have professional backgrounds, even though you'll be hard-pressed to differentiate them from the Missouri locals.

It's a seamless mix, just like the genres, as film noir serves as a backdrop for neo-realism, the latter being the stuff of real nightmares. Ree Dolly will never get to Orange County, or anywhere but here, the boonies, because the army dreamer has her hands tied; she can't leave the Ozarks, not with two younger siblings and a zombie for a mom.

Long after her father's hands return from the crime lab, the young girl, with little education and no career prospects, will probably start a meth lab of her own. It's a future mountain ballad that would bring a tear in the banjo player's eye.