Winter's Bone: Hiding in the backwoods

Somewhere in the Ozarks, though it could be any number of places cradled beyond the fringes of modern prosperity, we can no doubt find communities just like this, where men are either absent or to be found cooking up drugs, driving trucks, or just getting wasted and mean and violent, while tough women do the grunt work, finding something to eat, holding down the fort—perhaps literally—and just generally negotiating for their family’s survival. Sometimes music is played on fiddles and guitars, and when this happens it’s just about the only time we see men and women enjoying each other’s company in Winter’s Bone, though surely there are other unseen interactions, love-making at least, that would explain how these people keep going, how one generation follows another.

Debra Granik and her co-scenarist Anne Roselini’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel embraces both the harsh beauty of its setting and the utter bleakness of its portrait of life among these rural poor, their abandoned cars, muddy clothes, and burnt-down meth labs, their lack of work and surplus of weight. Unlike Ang Lee’s 1999 adaptation of Woodrell’s Ride With the Devil, it’s a fairly humourless movie, though I think its tone is imposed less by Granik’s striving for seriousness than by the needs of story and genre. This is a thriller driven by desperation. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is only 17, but she alone is responsible for raising her much younger siblings. Her mother’s incapacitated and her father who knows where, maybe dead. She needs to find out, because he’s apparently skipped bail and the family’s property could be taken away. Ree spends the movie going from one unfriendly door to another in search of someone, anyone, who can help, even her extended family, not necessarily an advisable resource in this place where blood ties can lead to bloody conflicts and certain households maintain a mafia-like grip on the meager local economy. “Never ask for what ought to be offered,” Ree instructs her little brother, which is another way of saying steer clear of anything that feels like less than straight-ahead generosity.

Yet, while there are definitely times in Winter’s Bone when the menace feels overcooked, generosity is not alien to this place or to this story. Though Ree gets threatened, beat-up, and abandoned, she also has a neighbour that lends her feed for her horse; a friend saddled with a small child and a dink for a husband who nonetheless gives her a ride when she needs it; an uncle’s girlfriend who gives her a joint to chill out after a terrifying encounter in the uncle’s kitchen; she meets one of her dad’s girlfriends, played by Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee, who tries to give her a useful lead on dad’s whereabouts (so that’s what would have become of Laura Palmer had she lived); she’s saved from possible death by that same very scary aforementioned uncle (John Hawkes, a near ghost of a man); she’s given some good advice from a US military recruiter who can see that she, like so many in her part of the country, is considering the army just for the money.

Ree’s already proven her resilience before the story even begins by caring her family and home and teaching the kids to fend for themselves, even to hunt and skin squirrels if occasion calls. “Do we eat those parts?” her little brother asks, looking at the squishy, steaming guts. “Not yet,” Ree answers flatly. Ree will prove her fortitude again and again, discovering inner resources she probably didn’t even know she had along the way, and Lawrence gives a tremendous performance, one that feels like pure adrenaline with no time to waste on ingratiating winks. But the story rewards Ree’s almost mythical testing of will, not with anything like a fantasy happy ending but with the simple reassurance that when things go from bad to worse, with a little bit of luck, someone will be there who gives a shit, and will extend any free hand they can.

Paradise lies on the other end of the magic intestine: Coraline

It all begins with a girl and a house. Her parents are there, too, having just transplanted the whole family, but they’re too bogged down with gardening literature projects to even bother unpacking and sprucing things up, and anyway they’re too impatient. There’s also the neighbouring boy, but he’s so sheepishly well intentioned and sort of annoying, and anyway, a boy. There’s a cat, but he’s a mangy old puss that’s kind of falling apart. There are other neighbours who will prove to be genuine eccentrics and sources of diversion, but they come a little later. So what sticks in my mind after watching it is Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) and this house, looming, so empty and creaky and drab, like pretty much everything surrounding it in this permanently overcast, hilly rural Halloween setting.

Coraline and the house are a good match, even if she doesn’t recognize it at first. She’s sly and given to mischief, while the house hides a secret labyrinth. They’re both deceptively compact, she being so slight yet fiercely resilient, and the house, for all its dilapidated grandeur, holds countless inner passageways and impossible spaces. Soon she’ll discover a little door in a wall that during the day opens only onto brick but at night onto this intestinal tunnel, at the end of which is a parallel world where everything seems sort of the same yet suddenly much more fun. Precariously fun. There’s a mechanical chicken that shits out popcorn. There’s a burlesque show performed by elderly acrobats (voiced by the always lively pairing of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) for an audience of Scottish terriers.

Most importantly, there is an “Other-mother” and “Other-father,” completely devoted to their beloved little girl, cooking up delicious meals, showering Coraline with gifts and games, so attentive as to seem almost pathological. They have black buttons for eyes, rendering their every expression of servile joy a little hollow. And here, we sense, is the catch. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch but Coraline’s going to learn it the hard way. In a way Coraline is a haunted house story, built around the protagonist’s ability to identify and drive away the demon spirits.

It would be enough to get just about anything new from Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. His stop-motion animation has such a tactile quality that feels only more enchanting now that so many mainstream animated films fuss endlessly over computer-generated whimsy. His figures each possess unique rhythms, and their transformations are so much more startling for having mass and texture. But the story of Coraline, taken from the novel by Neil Gaiman, is pretty enchanting in its own right, a throwback in the best possible way to old-fashioned stories that lure the magical out of the ordinary. The role of the döppelganger doll Coraline is given near the start is especially smart in that it adds to the richness of Selick’s world and its fascination with objects and the shadow side of just about everything. Pretty fun, overall, and probably ideally suited to kids just old enough to handle a few scenes of extended creepiness.