Rough Roads

~ Winter’s Bone ~ Book and Movie ~

Daniel Woodrell’s slim, bleakly powerful novel Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks, in a house where the road “has got rough to where you about can’t call it a road no more”. It features Ree Dolly, 16 years old and longing to get out and away.

brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes […]. She stood tall in combat boots, scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs.

Ree, though, has a family who depends on her — two young brothers and a largely catatonic mother — and she is not one to walk out on her responsibilities. Unlike her father, a crank (methamphetamine) cook who comes and goes, and now appears to have jumped bail. Their house was collateral for his bail, and so is in danger of being repossessed. Ree’s only hope to keep the house is to find her father.

Ree’s family name, Dolly, means much in this part of the world.

There were two hundred Dollys, plus […] Dollys by marriage, living within thirty miles of this valley. Some lived square lives, many did not.

And one of them might know where her father is. Ree goes to the powerful elders in increasingly fearsome order: Uncle Teardrop with his scarred face and missing ear from a meth lab accident; Little Arthur, who “even without crank in his blood he always seems cocked”; and eventually, the terrifying Thump Milton, “a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched. His voice held raised hammers and long shadows”.

There is no outsider’s gaze in this novel. It is written entirely in Ree’s voice and thoughts, which go from determined to matter-of-fact to weary to loving to longing to resigned wistfulness back to practical, all in a few pages. The hillbilly culture is never explained or condescended to: they are violent; they are kind to family in their own way, bringing over deer legs or pain pills if needed; there are feuds and long memories; there is hunger, poverty and relative wealth ; they never forgive a snitch; they have moved on from moonshine to pot and meth and opioids.

Debra Granik’s 2010 film of this 2006 novel retains much of its tone and atmosphere. It stars Jennifer Lawrence in a breakthrough role as Ree.

The film, like the book, shows rather than tells. We can see Ree’s longing as she watches the ROTC kids in the high school and dreams of joining the army, or her flashing anger when a cousin offers to adopt her brother. Lawrence has a casual physical comfort when peeling potatoes or walking a horse that is exactly right for Ree.

The novel’s setting and sense of place is excellent:

The world seemed huddled and hushed and her crunching steps cracked loud as ax whacks. [..]

Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

Ree’s world seems less bleak and isolated in the film, with scenes in the high school, an army recruiting depot, and a farm auction that add context. The movie’s junked-out cars, abandoned decrepit shacks and houses, and hardbitten, lined people of indeterminate age fill out the mental images from the book.

The characters, seen visually, are also less grim than in the novel: the scary Thump Milton here seems merely old, content to let his women deal with problems. John Hawkes stands out as Uncle Teardrop, lacking the horrific scars of the book, but carrying a constant tension in his body that accounts for the way people react to him. Fiercely intimidating and apparently uncaring in his first scene with Ree, that fierceness comes through as protectiveness to his brother’s family later in the film. With few words, Hawkes lets you see the complex layered motivations of Teardrop.

Both the book and the film are a compelling portrayal of some striking characters set deeply in a particular culture.

Book: Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. Little, Brown, 2006.

Film: Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik. 2010.