After taking a quick glance over the wikipedia page for Winter’s Bone, seeing numbers like 95%, 8.4 and 93%, phrases like Grand Jury Prize and Best Screenplay, I decided that “This will be good” and shut my laptop off, without even glancing at the synopsis. It is rare for me to go into a film “clean” like this and so when I slid my unlimited card through the swiper (for the last time) and settled into my seat I was excited. I didn’t have a clue what to expect except quality. But after literally 30 minutes of adverts (not the films fault), and 100 minutes of film I got up and left, profoundly unaffected by what I had witnessed.
First of all an excuse as to why I haven’t updated this yet my laptop died. RIP Silver Compaq who I can’t be bothered reaching over and turning upside down to see it’s actual name. In the time since my last entry I ha seen 3 films that I will be reviewing. The other films I will review in full, this one is going to be a little shorter simply because it’s been about a week since I saw it and I found it mostly forgetful. Excuse over.
So yeah, I was unaffected by Winter’s Bone. The amount of critical acclaim that this film has received has completely mystified me. I feel as though I am doing something wrong by not liking it, I would go and watch it again, if the thought of that didn’t make me want to slip into a coma.
Each actor immersed themselves completely into their roles, the hillbilly characters were suitably menacing and individual, everyone seemed very real. The central performance from Lawrence is brilliant, she manages to convey her character’s strength with great credibility. It takes someone special to tackle a character with such subtle emotional tells and hopefully she has great things ahead of her.
But great acting does not make a good film. The premise seems pretty strong. A missing father has put up the house his wife and children live in to pay his bail bond and his daughter must track him down so as not to lose it. Quite a bit going on there, certainly enough for a film. The first thing that I noticed was that in the first 30 minutes I was being treated to the same scene, over and over again. Girl goes to house and asks where dad is, but leaves without finding anything out after being treated with varying degrees of hostility before returning home to care for her little brother and sister. The scenes with Ree’s family are pretty nice, but the thriller element doesn’t try hard enough to build any interest.
A lot of critics have celebrated the films exploration of a hidden culture and the close knit community as an obstacle was pretty well developed, but without a wider scope it feels as though this situation is one isolated to Ree and the people she knows. It feels wrong to call a film too subtle, but in the delivery of key facts in the hunt for her father this film was… ummm… too subtle. The ramifications of each revelation were never fully explored, there wasn’t an emotional build up. It had a ‘time bomb’ – the week she has to find her father – but it never feels urgent, there isn’t enough tension to engage with the characters journey and so at the end of the film I felt very little towards her position.
I would like to say that Winter’s Bone left me feeling angry, that it left me feeling bored or annoyed. I would love to say that it left me amazed and moved and joyful. But it didn’t. It didn’t make me feel anything. Not bored, not annoyed, not amazed. Not anything. But it got 94% on Rotten Tomatoe, so you should probably check it out.
