Review: Winter's Bone

Review: Winter's Bone

Rating: **

Nonna's Rating: $

Rotten Tomatoes: 94%

I am really swimming upstream on this one, but I cannot recommend Winter's Bone. I know it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. I know the acting and the recreation of life in the Ozarks is chillingly real. I know critics have loved it.

But I didn't.

It's the story of a teenage girl living well below the poverty line with her incapacitated mother and two younger siblings. Her father, a meth cooker, has jumped bail and they are in danger of losing their house and their land. The girl decides to search for her father and convince him to turn himself in.

Most of the critics have ended their reviews by saying that this unremittingly depressing movie ends on a hopeful, positive note. I did not hear that note. Instead, I saw a 17-year-old girl making choices that trapped her in a twisted world from which she would never escape. Yes, she was a survivor; she knew the code of the Ozarks: "Don't tell nobody 'bout nothin'." But can she survive for long? The meth cooking culture is too unpredictable, too randomly violent to navigate safely.

And, before you think I just can't handle depressing stories, let me recommend two other films far superior to this one: Precious and Frozen River, a movie that also depicts poor people in desperate situations -- but this one lets hope out of Pandora's Box.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price
$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it