“Winter’s Bone” opens up with a chilling old country setup; a gloomy environment, calm and sedative to the point of exhaustion. The family lives in a house overlooking dry grasslands, in the distant neighborhood is a horse stable run by a rather indifferent woman. The surroundings are so evocative of morbid dullness, as if it is upon you and there is nothing you can do to avoid it. The brief shot of protagonist chopping timber before she sets on the journey, to me, is the most definitive; she chops wood leisurely, with an absolute surety of the inconsequential life, it is at once infectious. Unconsciously, audience is influenced by this scene.
As the protagonist steps up on the act of finding the whereabouts of her father, the aloofness that the family she represents is more accentuated. The neighbors, immediate relatives all seem to bear upon them, a stigma of isolation. Something underneath seems to rise up in flames that obfuscate the present situation. It is as though the collapse of family ties are hidden deep in the thicket of a past that cannot be exposed to the day’s sun, not yet.
the landscape improvises as the movie progresses; abandoned houses with slanted roofs, some of them with tree branches shearing them apart. House after house, she visits, without receiving much aid. The relationships in the neighborhood seem so torn and battered, like the thorny iron grilled hedgerow. Every door she knocks on, has the smeared blood of the past written on the door knobs; looking through the window from the houses are the eyes of past, filled with fatal tears. The families have grown so apart, and so distant that it seems all the more inconceivable.
“don’t you have a man who could do this for you” observes a lady. The pitiful plight of the protagonist however, seems to gain on the lady.
In the midst of the somber dullness, the protagonist (played with refinement that I thought remarkable and unseen for a long time in Hollywood) teaches her siblings survival tactics. Hunting for deer, she notes “if you stay quiet, they will come out”. Same can be said about the mood of the movie at this point. It switches from that of a barely innocuous search for the father to that of a pernicious one.
There is absolutely no background score in the beginning, but gradually, it snuggles up behind the scenes without the audience noticing it at all. reminds me of Cronenberg’s “History of violence” and “Eastern Promises”. Family feud overlaps with the incurable past.
“Winter’s Bone” is a great success, for what it has achieved. The loneliness of protagonist is not exploited fully (in evoking deep settled forgiving emotions), and that suits best for the movie. At the end of the movie, in the scene where an exchange of allegorical hostility occurs between the sheriff and protagonist’s close family, is another great moment.
All in all, the movie has a tone of glum and seriousness. Terry Gilliam’s “Tideland” was intended to deliver this backdrop, and explode open the silent emotions of a reclusive neighborhood. But, I thought he failed miserably. Winter’s bone succeeded where Terry Gilliam failed.
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