Here's the Grand Jury Prize winner from this year's Sundance Festival, and it's a fairly typical Sundance winner -- low-budget, regional, a bit too satisfied with its own gritty authenticity -- but it's gone some terrific performances that make it absolutely worth seeing.
The setting is the Missouri Ozarks, where 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) is raising two younger siblings and caring for her mentally disturbed mother; her father has disappeared, as he frequently does when he's hiding from the law. But this time, his bail bondsman tells Ree, he's put the family home up as security towards his bail, and if he misses his upcoming court date, Ree and her family will be homeless. So it's up to Ree to wade through the complicated maze of meth dealers and thugs who make up her extended family (everyone we meet seems to be a distant cousin of some sort or other), trying to find her father when everyone has their own reasons for not wanting him found.
Lawrence gives a star-making performance as Ree; she has a spectacularly communicative face, and when she's silent, we know exactly what she's thinking and (often more important in this story) what she's trying to keep hidden. She gets equally strong support from John Hawkes as her uncle Teardrop, who finds that his natural tendency to let sleeping dogs lie is not quite as strong as his family loyalty, and Dale Dickey as Merab, a family matriarch who guards her husband's privacy and business interests with an iron fist. ("No, he won't see you," she tells Ree. "Talkin' to people just leads to witnesses.")
(It drove me nuts the whole movie trying to figure out where I'd seen Dickey before; I had to look her up at IMDB to realize that she was Patty the Daytime Hooker from My Name Is Earl. I love being surprised when an actor I think of in one way knocks me for a loop with a completely different type of character.)
Winter's Bone is being compared by a lot of critics to Frozen River, and the comparison is understandable; they're both movies with very strong sense of place, about determined women dealing with the financial problems left to them by irresponsible men. I think Frozen River is a slightly better movie; it lacks the undercurrent of condescension towards the rural poor that I sometimes feel in Winter's Bone, and I think the Ozark cliches are sometimes laid on a bit too thick. But Lawrence, Hawkes, and Dickey all give top-notch performances here, and they are more than enough reason to see the movie.
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