The Kidd Vs. Winter’s Bone
There’s a reason Jennifer Lawrence is receiving all sorts of acclaim for her stellar performance as the forced-into-action heroine Ree Dolly in WINTER’S BONE. She is absolutely brilliant as the 17-year-old forced to abandon all hopes and dreams and any sense of normalcy, in order to provide for her siblings and mentally sick mother, all who were abandoned by the drug addict father. We miss the journey from girl to womanhood, but the battle scars on Ree are fairly visible, with the care and well-being of her family resting entirely on her shoulders, a job that shouldn’t be left to a teenager. Even having gone through all that shit in the middle of the Ozarks, the pile keeps getting bigger, because, in addition to having to watch after everyone, she know has to watch out for her junkie dad, who put up the family’s house in order to post bond for his most recent arrest. If he doesn’t show up for his court date, it’ll all be gone, and Ree and her family will be left with nothing but a much harder life. So begins her search to track down her father, with the goal being to save the very little that they have left.
Unfortunately, outside of Lawrence’s performances, there isn’t much to WINTER’S BONE, a film that grows tirelessly repetitive with a good portion of its narrative made up of Ree visiting various shady characters engrossed in the drug culture her father was involved with, asking them if they know where he is, and them refusing to offer up help of any kind. This includes her friend and her uncle, who, even knowing the stakes, refuse to get involved. Even her own cousin tries to sell her on the idea that her dad is dead, killed in a meth lab explosion, primarily for the reason of trying to take Ree’s brother in order to raise him as their own. Heart-warming family values, no…?
Maybe it’s because I don’t have my refrigerator on the outside of my house or a set of broken-down cars in my front yard or I grew up with a good family set-up, but The Kidd has a hard time relating to these types of characters. You want to see Ree do well, to save her family and their property, because, for someone unwillingly thrust into this situation, she deserves better. She deserves to catch a break. However, the rest of the cast is played up as stereotypical rednecks, and form a group so unlikable that each scene grows more bothersome than the last. Perhaps if I was hanging around with guys named Thump and Teardop more often, I might get it… but WINTER’S BONE I just don’t get.
The usually reliable John Hawkes plays her uncle, the aforementioned Teardrop, and it winds up being a fairly inconsistent role. Teardrop goes from not wanting to get involved and chasing his niece from his house to suddenly choosing to help to wanting answers about his brother to not wanting answers about his brother to backing up the closest family he’s got. None of the change in his character is fluid at all, giving the impression that writer-director Debra Granik didn’t know exactly what she wanted Teardrop to be. And that seems to be one of the biggest issues I had with WINTER’S BONE… quite a few characters are presented that way, turning their personalities on a dime in a completely different direction, unlike what has been set up with them before.
Her friend is unable to lend her a truck to drive around in search of her father, because her husband told her no, and she obliged. Yet then we find that she took the keys anyway, stealing them from him, without any repercussions, even though the world we’re placed in isn’t afraid to let us know that a man will take action against a woman if she doesn’t do what he says. And it all starts to feel more contrived to move the characters where it feels they should be placed, not where the story would naturally let them go.
Ree continues to hold onto this idea that this drug culture, made up on a great deal of her extended family, should be willing to help her and her family’s cause, because they are somehow distantly related, and that bloodline should count for something. However, these are the same people that constantly turn away her cries for help, and very well may be responsible for the death of her dad to begin with, not to mention it’s filled with addicts who pop out bags of their product and go to town on it right in front of you… so the fact that she is blind and naive to the fact that they aren’t the type of people who offer up this kind of assistance regardless of who is involved doesn’t jive with the tough, hard-nosed character she’s made out to be for most of the movie. WINTER’S BONE wound up being too scattered for The Kidd, and, as a result, at times, it really took me out of what I was watching.
Director Debra Granik does a fine job in creating this desperate piece of the world. In choosing to shoot a lot of the rundown locations and nature in the middle of winter, where the trees are bare and everything has a sense of coldness to it, you can feel the despair and the hardship surrounding these characters. However, there are moments where she tries to get too cute, injecting some rather unnecessary video footage of a squirrel in a forest that is so unlike any other part of the film, you find yourself for the next few minutes wondering “What the fuck was that?” instead of being drawn further into the plight of Ree. In addition, the pacing of WINTER’S BONE is incredibly slow, so what should only be an hour-and-40-minutes worth of movie feels like 2-and-a-half-hours… far too long for me to ever want to spend with these characters.
One of the minor characters has a line that basically sums up all of WINTER’S BONE. She asks, “Your dad left you to do all that? That’s fucked-up.” And it is fucked-up for the entire ordeal of WINTER’S BONE to fall on a teenager to basically raise and take care of a family. As a result, you get an excellent performance from Jennifer Lawrence for having to carry such a burden. The rest of the movie never rises to that level though, and what you’re left with is an average movie with 1 far-above-average performance. If you want to check out the film in order to see Lawrence, go right ahead. You won’t be disappointed in her, but the rest of WINTER’S BONE doesn’t offer up much else.
