Jennifer Lawrence

There is true grit in the stoical countenance of Ree Dolly, the dirt-poor, 17-year-old heroine of “Winter’s Bone,” director Debra Granik’s austere, plain-spoken saga of destitution and faith set in the hardscrabble hills and hollows of Missouri’s Ozarks.

Like a distant cousin to the willful Mattie Ross, the determined teen whose quest enlivened the 1969 Arkansas-Indian Territory film “True Grit” (recently remade by the Coen Brothers), Ree is a reluctant detective determined to hunt down her man and to stand firm in the face of danger. Except where Mattie’s adventure was picturesque and chipper, Ree’s is largely squalid and harrowing.

Granik, in just her second picture after 2004’s similarly stark “Down to the Bone,” has adapted Daniel Woodrell’s flinty novel with a stripped-down aesthetic that brings home the abject poverty, the lowdown Southern gothic creepiness, the meth-addled horrors of life in the deepest depths of the Ozarks’ insular hill country.

Everywhere, there are trash-gutted yards, ramshackle hovels, foreclosed lives and the barren faces of people made crazy and old before their time. Where once, moonshining was the region’s going illegal concern, crystal-meth cooking as taken its place and left a scourge of misery, hatefulness and waste in its wake.

It’s in this grim setting that Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, heartbreakingly brilliant) barely survives with her invalid, spirit-broken mother and younger brother and sister. One wintry day, the sheriff arrives to inform Ree that her father is due in court on drug-dealing charges and has put their property up as bond collateral. So, if he doesn’t show up, this good ‘ol boy drawls, “well, ya’ll gonna lose this place.”

So Ree stiffens her spine and sets out, with the reluctant aid of her volatile uncle, a crankhead named Teardrop (John Hawkes), to track down her father. And a dire trek it is, through a fearsome countryside populated by wily kin who are suspicious of all, who are unwilling to help and recoil, often violently, at her inquiries.

The brilliance of Granik’s way with this harsh material is in the abiding empathy she brings to the telling, in the quasi-documentary realism she applies (she filmed in actual locations and mingled many locals in among the actors) and in her obsessively detailed, ethnographer’s sense of place and local culture.

Cinematographer Michael McDonough’s gritty, unvarnished camera work and several spare, well-placed grace notes of haunting bluegrass music overlay the film with a bedrock air of backwoods authenticity.

But it’s mainly in young Lawrence’s performance (she was a teen at the time of filming) that “Winter’s Bone” achieves a stirring quality of honor and dignity amid the human squalor. It’s a verbally spare performance, but one heightened with steely undercurrents of determination, inner strength and desperate bravery. Certainly, she’s an acting force to watch out for during awards season.

“Winter’s Bone” is much easier to admire than it is to love. The breathtaking, Dante-esque depravity that Ree Dolly encounters on her journey is often hard to endure, but the compassion and tenderness of this endearing heroine make the trek well worth taking. At the risk of falling prey to awards-season hyperbole, this is undoubtedly one of the year’s best movies.

- Dennis King

“Winter’s Bone”

R
1:40
4 stars
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser, Kevin Breznaha, Isaiah Stone
(Some drug material, language and violent content)

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