FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Debra Granik - Winter's Bone

Since the 1990s we have learned that the state has become increasingly slim and helpless. During the Corona period, however, we were surprised to discover that the state can close down the whole country. Now, in the following social upheavals (60% of the wage, but 100% of the rent etc) it will claim that it cannot influence everything. Such thoughts come to me in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone.

The screen heroes who touch me the most are not extroverted. They don't strut up and down vainly in front of us, they don't make great speeches, they don't lead armies. They don't have superpowers. They are ordinary people who have to face a certain situation. Ree Dolly is such a hero. She must be 17 and acts as a kind of maid for her younger sister and her little brother. You're like a mother. We are in the hinterland of the Ozarks. Her mother is mentally blacked out and just sitting around all day. Father cooked chrystal meth and got arrested for it. Anyway, he disappeared without a trace. Now Ree takes care of her siblings, raises them and feeds them - always dependent on the neighbours, on support. The two children - like all children who are not beaten - are friendly and full of energy. They love to play! They have not yet realised that they grow up disadvantaged. This world in which Debra Granik's film takes place is presented in a desolate sobriety. We get to know a society that's lost. One that will never fit into a Hollywood movie! The question of how Ree could grow up and become so strong in this world remains unanswered. How did she become so independent, so proud? She can't have inherited it from her parents. The reason we immediately accept Ree as such is Jennifer Lawrence. Like all over the world, we experience an unprecedented Lawrence boom at the Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo. The then 19-year-old acts as passionately and steadfastly as in her later expensive films. Lawrence, the quiet heroine, doesn't boast, doesn't dodge problems and seems to believe unshakably that people will do the right thing. Winter's Bone is also a film in which a star sees the light of day! "Don't ask for what ought to be offered"; teaches Ree to her little brother. Is that how she raised herself? Everyone around knows her father made amphetamines and sold them. Obviously, he couldn't even make money on meth! Now he is gone and Ree is looking for him, otherwise the house would be seized. She stays for a week... I think the model for Granik's film is the Odyssey. The endpoint is Ree's father, dead or alive. Ree struggles through a landscape as inhospitable as if we were in the middle of the apocalypse. A post disaster. Sometimes you think that the TV sets or cars don't even fit into the picture and are probably relics from earlier times. It is the houses of people who have reached the bottom. For them, there is no chance. Incidentally, Granik's film is not about these people, but plays UNDER them: Ree doesn't consider any of them inferior - after all, she herself belongs to them! I think for a girl like you, this life is normal. Heartlessness and disappointments are commonplace for Ree. In their father's world, everyone is a criminal, has contacts with a criminal or is subject to one. Everyone suspects everyone. In older "Badlands" films, these people would distrust such films from the outside. In Winter's Bone you don't trust your friends, even your own family. Every encounter with Rees brings us closer to one of these people and every time we realize how damaged his humanity is. Is it so that they see a girl in need of help in Ree? No, they perceive them as a danger to take something away from them, since they themselves are in need of help. A story like that, full of hate and amorality, could easily become unbearable. But real courage and hope can compensate for this. We are born optimistic and in every horrible situation, there are few people who will help (at least that's how Ree would judge it).