Winters Bone Review

[Westside Steve]

Winters Bone

Roadside Attractions

R 100 min

The reason I’m getting to this one now is the latest marketing scheme of the Academy. They’ve bowed to commercial pressure to double the number of best picture nominees to get more, well, butts in the seats.

This one’s a murder suspense flick set against the backdrop of the impoverished Ozark Mountains, the struggling residents and the perils of the crystal meth trade.

Meth is a pretty ugly addiction and takes an extreme toll on everyone that comes in contact whether it’s the makers to the end users, often one and the same.

These ill effects are even more drastic when mixed with stark poverty of the Ozarks.

Jessup Dolly is a recently freed meth who has gone missing soon after signing over his homestead as bailment. Unless 17 year old daughter Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) can track him down she, her addled mother and two young siblings will lose everything.

Ree is being stonewalled and worse at every step of her search by dad’s old cronies, friends, family and the law. It seems everyone is involved in some dark secret.

Though the story isn’t particularly new, I like the concept of the backwoods a lot.

Besides the rather slow pace, my complaint is something that often bothers me about accents and dialect.

Maybe it’s my East Ohio roots, but it seems actors rarely catch a realistic Appalachian accent. Here too the phrases seem to have come from the vision of a writer than actual people.

At any rate it is offbeat enough to have won praise at the Sundance festival and garnered a best pic nomination.

B-

WSS

[ballpeen]

You can hear a fake southern/mountain accent a mile away.....that bothers me too.