Dry Ice Factory

Saw this movie last night at the Guild 45th with birthday boy holyoutlaw. And what a happy little movie it is! I first heard about it in Lucius Shephard's rave notice on theinferior4, where he hoped it would bring more attention to Daniel Woodrell, who wrote the source novel. (I promptly discovered that Woodrell also wrote Woe to Live On, which was the source novel for Ang Lee's Civil War movie Ride with the Devil, so while I still haven't read anything by him, at least the name is starting to stick.)

Winter's Bone, directed by Debra Granik, is set in the Missouri Ozarks. It practically compels you to use words like "bleak," "hard-scrabble," and, oh, I don't know, "fucked up". Yet "bleak" really seems too hard a word. It's an effort to naturalistically convey a life of poverty in a rural American setting. It reminded me to some extent of Wendy and Lucy (2008), which was also about a young woman -- a girl still, really -- struggling to survive without many resources to speak of. Yet this movie has more social context for its protagonist, the 17-year-old Ree, and it comes closer to telling a standard genre crime story as well. Ree is supporting her basketcase mother and her younger brother and sister. Her meth-cooking father has disappeared, and if he doesn't show up in court the house that Ree and her family live in will be taken away. Ree begins a search for her father, and through her we explore what amounts to a family gang structure around the production of meth.

For all that it's a crime story that can be justifiably described as Ozark noir, it is as much a character and sociological study as anything else. It's the depiction of both the limited options open to Ree, and of the resources that are available to her -- and they do exist, which is why "bleak" seems like too hard a word for this movie. I don't think it qualifies as poverty porn, but I'll be curious to see how it plays as more people see it. I suppose I should mention that although this is a crime film, there isn't much in the way of violence, although there is one fairly gruesome scene that isn't for the squeamish. But nobody dies! Except for a couple of squirrels.