Quest

Off to the cinema with my lovely friend T. to be thoroughly depressed.


Winter's Bone is just one of those films: a terrible story takes place among people whose lives are already marginal and grim, this group living in the economically depressed (actually more like inactive) Ozark Mountains of Missouri, where their diet is as likely as not to consist of squirrels shot in the local woods.


But Winter's Bone is actually much more than just a dabbling in the depressed lives of unfortunates.

It has something of the mythic quality of a modern fairy tale, where our hero (or, this being an age of equality, our heroine(sic)), sets off on a quest to find an emblematic trophy. She encounters trials and dangers from unknown and half-known adversaries, many of whom are objects of terror. But she is driven to succeed.


I won't be the first person to suggest that the film's central performance, by Jennifer Lawrence, is likely to be Oscar-nominated.

But this is a film full of strong females -- not all of them necessarily very prepossessing.


There are echoes here from other films of marginal groups -- a banjo obviously invokes memories of Deliverance -- but this film is a gripping, well-constructed thriller that reminded me most of Frozen River, reviewed somewhere or other on one of my predecessor blogs.


Are there any men?

Well, yes: terrifyingly unpredictable characters like the utterly misnamed Teardrop:


These are people mostly living lives of poverty: I don't necessarily mean economic poverty, but spiritually and culturally. There is little joy to be had for them, which makes the moments when it does appear all the more thrilling in what turned out to be a rather invigorating movie.