Film review: Winter's Bone (Director: Debra Granik)

"Way down in missouri" a lone female voice, not particularly young or polished, is singing. A boy is riding his skateboard, a girl is jumping on an old trampoline, an older girl is hanging up laundry. Short, passing glances, looking in from the outside, into a world that looks poor, harsh but friendly enough at first, a family still life with a fair amount of warmth. The first scenes are more like sketches, torn from a drawing book, not fully worked out, patch together to create the idea of what the finished picture might look like. The opening is totally unassuming and unspectatacular, yet it breathes an atmospheric density that hasn't been seen in American film for a long time. Granik and her excellent cinematographer Michael McDonough drench their world in pale, grey-bluish colors that announce the harshness, brutality and coldness of this world from the word go.

It is a twilight world Granik shows, inhabited by twilight people. People at the bottom end of socienty, below the awareness threshold for most of us, people at the edge of life. There is a zombie-like quality to these meth-cooking, stony-faced people, hovering somewhere between life and death, hardly even going through the motions anymore. And in the middle of all of this is a 17-year-old girl looking with a mad mother, a brother and sister who she takes care of, who must find her father in order to save the shabby home which is all they have.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Ree with a stubbornness, a refusal to not give up, to save her family, a wilful ignorance of the silent laws that want her to pursue her goal, that is hard to forget. An innocent, quite pretty face that oozes refusal to give in. It is a remarkable and memorable portrayal by a totally unknown actress who well deserved her Oscar nomination. Lawrence does not seem to do much, it is not a world in which people allow emotions to show themselves on their faces. The way her oddyssey is reflected so subtly in her face makes it all the more memorable.

Talking about faces: These are hardened faces, beaten by weather, life, violence, grief and hard drugs. They're roughly hewn faces, as if chiselled with a blunt instrument. Faces of stone, changing between varios degrees of suspicion and hostility. As Ree goes on her quest she becomes an outcast, violating the unwritten laws of the land, an intruder into hermetically closed microcosms. Again and again, she intrudes, again and again, faces turn, expressionless at best, more often suspicious, increasingly hostile. Critics have called this a "country film noir" aqnd indeed, Granik uses many genre elements from the noir to the thriller. However, she weaves them so carefully into the fabric of her quest in the twilight, that they become a natural part of the film.

As dark and hopeless as it seems, there is always a glimpse of hope. Mostly this lies in Ree, who just cannot accept that her quest may be futile who just goes on, not allowing the option of failure. And with this stubbornness she slowly begins to affect the people around her. First and foremost Teardrop, her father's older brother, a sorrowful wreck of a man, hostile and violent at first, later as violently supportive as her quest becomes his. But mostly it is the women who, cautiously, sometimes hidden from view, come closest to showing humaneness. They are hard women, as brutal and unforgiving as the men, but pragmatists too. They first are the leaders in violence before they enable ree to fulfill her quest. If there is action in this world, if decisions are made, they are made by women.

So when the film ends, all is not lost in this twilight world. The faces are the same, the world as dark and colorless, the lives as hard, even the opening scenes are repeated. And yet things go on, the family intact, something has changed, hardly visible, but somehow present. The way Granik creates atmosphere, the way she makes changes more felt than seen, has not been seen for quite a while. As overused as the term is, if there is one film in the last 12 months, that deserves to be called a masterpiece, it is Winter's Bone.