short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Winter’s Bone (2010, USA)

I know it’s unfair to compare a movie to its source novel too much. So I’ll start off with what I think the film version of Winter’s Bone got right – the casting, for starters, is pretty spot-on. Jennifer Laurence is every bit as strong as she’s been touted as Ozark tough-girl Rhee Dolly, and John Hawkes is terrific as her meth-aggro uncle, Teardrop. The movie also feels right – the visuals, including threadbare homes and cold hilly woods, sync right up to the ambient sounds of distant gunfire, dogs barking, and truck engines being gunned. But seeing as I read Daniel Woodrell’s novel just a couple of months ago, I can’t help but get hung up on how wrong the ending of the film felt to me – and here there be spoilers.

At the end of the novel, Rhee is presented with a choice – to live the life of the Dolly clan and quite likely end up like her friend Gail, weighed down by children, a tumultuous marriage, and never-ending financial woes, or to risk betraying her people by joining up with the local bail bondsmen, a probable path out of poverty and a way of assuring the futures of her young brother and sister. But the end of the film has the bail bondsman walking away without making his offer, leaving the final exchange between Rhee and a fellow adult (since adult is what seventeen-year-old Rhee becomes through the course of the film) a bittersweet moment with her uncle Teardrop, who is a Dolly through and through.

This change still leaves some ambiguity (what will Rhee do with her unexpected windfall? The book says, but the film does not.), but positions Rhee much closer to her clan than the final pages of the book does, and in doing so, it changes her journey. What kind of provider will she be? Does she truly have as many options? In some ways, the film presents a much bleaker picture of Rhee’s immediate future, though there’s no question were she to follow the lead of the bondsman from the novel, there would certainly be trouble. I’ll have to dig around a bit to see if I can find explanation for this shift, why the filmmakers chose to leave Rhee so squarely aligned with the Dollys, and as such, less her own person.

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