Winter's bone

Why do so distributors fail to convince movie-makers that the title of a successful book will not ensure its success as a movie. The opposite, for otherwise good films such as Winter's Bone.

What a miserable title that is. It didn't deter Sundance Festival audiences from making it an award-winner, but potential cineplex movie-goers are a very different kettle of easily discouraged fish. They will only flock to see it, and only then in small schools, if the indie thriller wins an award or two. Which it should do at the 2011 Golden Globes or Oscars.

Daniel (Ride with the Devil) Woodrell's 2006 novel about Missouri backwoods folk was adapted for the screen by director Debra Granik and co-writer Anne Rossellini. They also worked together on Granik's only other feature film, another multi-award-winner entitled, by ironic coincidence, Down to the Bone (2004). Their screenplay for Winter's Bone earned them the 2010 Sundance screenwriting award, and it is a remarkably mesmerising family drama, thriller, horror movie and female coming-of-age story set in Missouri's Ozarks hills. This is the sort of territory of vicious poor-white inbreeding that movies such as Deliverance made notorious.

The central character is a 17-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, taking care of her speechless crazy mother's woodland farm and two younger siblings. Her father, a crystal meths maker, has vanished and the farm will be lost to bondsmen if he isn't found. Ree's search for him among hills populated by criminal cousins is the only storyline and its credibility and grip depend on the lead actress.

Jennifer Lawrence portrays a young woman forced to be deadly serious in an environment where men verge on madness and their women must look and act ugly outside and inside. Even her uncle (John Deadwood Hawkes) cannot help her in the paranoid, almost incestuous clan. It is all in young Ree's fearful hands and Lawrence was a fine casting choice: she'd won acting awards in 2008 (Los Angeles, for Lori Petty's The Poker House, and Venice for Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain) and turned in another memorable performance for Granik.

The indie film is also well served by cinematographer Michael McDonough, who's worked with Granik since her New York student days and is also one of the film's co-producers. Much of the time, in a movie that avoids mood-setting music and employs natural rural sound effects, the calm camera work conveys the harshness, akin to daylight spookiness, of Missouri. Local-born Woodrell's writings have been called "country noir", and Granik captures that spirit. The movie's heroine wins in the end, but we fear her life is unlikely to amount to a hill of beans.

[Missouri state's film commission helped the production; it apparently bought an idea of promoting the caves in its hills as a tourist attraction. A DVD extra comprises the producers' apologetic note for their movie's only deleted scene, showing the heroine overnighting in uninteresting cave settings.]