Winter's Bone

John Hawkes is fucking fantastic in this. He plays a character that people that you don't want to fuck with in the locale that the film takes place in don't want to fuck with. It's the meatiest role of the pack, but it's also probably the easiest one to fuck up. The film is worth seeing simply to watch Hawkes craft a character that comes across as both utterly tragic and deserving of said tragic quality. He's a character that you wouldn't want to spend time with, but you also don't want to see him go. I know, I know. People have been praising the shit out of Jennifer Lawrence, but really, John Hawkes is the best thing in this movie. No contest. Lawrence is decent, but all she does is don a convincing drawl and act appropiately feisty in some scenes. This is kind of a lame criticism, but it also doesn't help that she'd look more at home on the set of a TeenNick show than this movie. She's too much of a cutie pie to blend in in this world-weary, wringled face setting, but maybe, that's the point.

The film itself took me by surprise in ways that I was appreciative of and not so much. I was expecting something akin to Frozen River, where our poor female protagonist does some dumb shit in order to make a buck, but thankfully, that wasn't the case. I was also expecting it to get more grueling as it went along and continually placing our protagonist in more horrific situations, but it didn't do that, either. The film is, for all extents and purposes, a mystery yarn and the resolution to said mystery is, well, rather anticlimatic. That's not that big of a deal. It's just that the film has all these ingredients for something more dramatic, I guess, and it doesn't deliver. When a character wields an axe within the film, my heart got pounding and I was expecting some serious shit to go down, but like the film as a whole, it dissolved basically into nothing. Just watch the damn thing in order to see the beauty of John Hawkes's performance.