Winter's Bone (2010)

The film is set in the Ozark mountains of the US, a region with a distinctive culture and terrain. I understand that the speech and manners have been authentically captured but for me this is as difficult to appreciate as would be for an American to distiguish, say, Kerala from Punjab. The film relates to the survival struggle of seventeen year old Ree, who takes care of her younger brother and sister and mentally incapacitated mother. The father belongs to a community of small time impoverished drug (amphetamine) makers and users and is currently on bail, having pledged the humble homestead as surety. Since he fails to appear in court, the family faces homelessness. The film relates to the heroic struggle of  young Ree in the subculture with it's brutal code of dealing with informers.

The film is too culture specific to it's country and the atypical social group among whom it is set to have much impact. It is neither here nor there--it is never quite able to decide whether to be a sociological study of a sub-culture or a human drama. It winds up as Americana and folk-lore. It fails to rise above sentimentality and caricature. On a human plane, the teenager's gritty battle in harrowing circumstances does evoke respect and admiration, specially the unusual emergence of character in such a hopeless, drug-infested environment--perhaps that is precisely the cause. Adversity, like war, brings out both the best and the worst.

The film reminds me of Kore-eda's Nobody Knows which is able to paint a more powerful picture of abandonment right in the middle of a booming metropolis without the props of an outlandish backdrop of drug sozzled hill-bills or hands being chainsawed off a dead body (Winter's Bone). Kore-eda's film is a searing indictment of individuals being ground in the blind wheels of a civilized society.