Winter's Bone

[osprey_archer]

I love Winter's Bone. I saw it over Christmas and saw it again a couple weeks ago when they had a free showing in the cinema, and I just love it.

The cinematography is wonderful. It's unsparing, telling an ugly story in a grim world, yet the quality of the light imbues it with a stark grace. Occasionally the camera happens on a lovely scene - a road through the forest in late afternoon, Ree running on the catwalk over the cattle pens - and the world is for a few moments almost unbearably beautiful.

The filmmakers are admirably restrained. Some of the scenes are damn rough, but they are never gratuitous: every shot is necessary to tell the story, but there are no extra shots wallowing the grime.

About the story. The first time through I had trouble following what Ree was doing, and even after the second I wouldn't like to give a plot summary. But the great genius of the film is that this doesn't matter. I couldn't follow the twists and turns, but I knew Ree's ultimate goal and I knew enough to know whether she was making any headway and I knew, most of all, why this mattered so much to her.

And, of course, I love, love, love Ree. She's so tough and she tries so hard, and her burdens are too much - not just for a seventeen-year-old, but for anyone; and yet she keeps going, because she has to.

In short, the movie is almost flawless. I loved it so much that I scuttled off to the library to get the book it's based on, Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone.

Woodrell's book, though accomplished, is not flawless; or at least, is not as much to my taste as the movie.

Its greatest strength is its prose. Woodrell's prose is spare and precise, so succinct as to be hard to read, yet beautiful. His prose gives his novel the same stark grace that the cinematography gives the film.

But there's nevertheless a pervading scuzziness to the book, like a film of dirt adhering to its surface. There's a lot of dirt in the book, a lot of non-metaphorical shit, and a pervasive air of vaguely exploitative sexuality. Ree jokes with a bus driver taking her into town that he's just doing it to get into her panties. Ree's best friend Gail got in a family way after a one-night stand and is stuck married to a loser. The only sexual relationship in the book that doesn't feel vaguely scuzzy is Ree's romance/affair/thing with Gail.

The Ree/Gail thing got cut from the movie, which probably should bother me. But I felt in the book that it existed as an opportunity for the reader to ogle - an impression which is reinforced by other such opportunities, particularly the scene where Ree spends a night naked in a cave which has no bearing on the story. (This also got cut from the film.)

So I can take or leave the book. But the movie based on it is excellent and very much worth seeing.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Sounds like the filmmakers took the very best parts of the book. In the movie, you could see how much support Ree and Gail drew from each other, and anything deeper than that between them was irrelevant for the central story.

And naked in a cave? That seems very over-the-top and not like the restraint of the rest of the [movie-version] story.

I loved the movie--haven't enjoyed a new movie so much in years.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The movie actually follows the book quite closely; the only big cuts are the ones I mentioned. But it's amazing how much they changed it while keeping the same characters and same plot line, just by changing the shading, as it were.

Oh, and they added a couple of scenes, too: the scene at the school, and the scene where Ree meets the army recruiter. Those are tremendously important, because they show that - though Ree probably can't escape (which depresses me; maybe when the kids are a bit older something will work out) - there is another world she can escape too.

Whereas in the book, although I think there's technically more contact with the outside world
- Ree's family has a television, there's a scene where Ree and Gail go shopping - the outside world always feels vaguely unreal. There is no escape, so on top of everything else there's a feeling of claustrophobia.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The recruiter scene was one of my favorite ones, so the director gets bonus points for imagining and then implementing that one.

Interesting about the feeling of claustrophobia--I can well believe it. And that's pretty strange/odd/effective given that there's also a sense of physical space.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Everything Is Illuminated? I saw the movie and LOVED it, then found out is was a book. The book is VASTLY different, but the filmmkaers took the central story and stayed true to IT, stripping away the rest. The end result bears only slight resemblence to the book, but somehow leaves you with the same feeling, walking away.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the movie or read the book, but is that Jonathan Safron (sp?) Foer? Because I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and liked that very much indeed.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

Yes--JSF. The movie is fabulous, the book is even fabulouser. I loooooved Extremely Loud etc. The battle of Dresden is one of those passages I have marked to read every now and again. It takes my breath away.

His wife, Nicole Krauss, wrote "The History of Love," and it too is fabulous. She doesn't write like her husband, but there are echoes of the same flavor. I figured it to be a romance, so when my mom
gave it to me, it sat on my shelf a while. When I found out she's JSF's wife, I thumbed through it. LOVE!

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the book, though I don't know that one can LOVE a book that bleak, and yet so full of hope--like The Road. It's hard to use the word love.

I haven't seen the movie yet. I read it as a book club book, and we're talking about watching the movie together once the weather gets warm (drive in on my little red barn out back!)

The Ree-naked-in-the-cave scene was another metaphor of Ree's rebirth. There were many. Caves being the womb of the world, her coming out naked, Ree made a conscious birth, a symbolic one. A touch dramatic and maybe a bit cliche, but the book itself is quite...primitive in aspect, so maybe it's ok. Then the whole thing with her having to go into water to retrieve her father's hands--her symbolic baptism, and once again a conscious choice Ree made, not a consequence of being an infant without will for such things.

Again, a little done to death, but I feel like they worked in the spirit of the story. There was even a creation myth built into it, so this too lent to the biblical feel of things.

A friend did some research after we read the book, and found that many of those old coal mining towns ended up methlabs. So sad.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

:/ I'm not a big fan of symbolic scenes which serve no other purpose in the narrative than being symbolic. Preferably a story should work on both a literal and metaphorical level, but if one of those level has to go I'd much rather it be the metaphorical.

This is one of the reasons I can't watch Buffy: they seem to care more about vampires-as-a-metaphor-for-high-school than vampires as vampires and it drives me up the wall.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big fan myself. I think that if it advances the story, yay, but if not, it's a bit...pretentious. Some people like that sort of thing. I tend not to "hate" it so much as roll my eyes when I find it. It needs to be well done, and being well done means not being obvious. This was a bit obvious. Ok...a LOT obvious.
;)