Review by Paul Buxton

Every year, there seems to be one breakout movie that takes everybody by surprise, a little-known masterpiece that sneaks out of low-budget obscurity to garner all the smart buzz and scoop up lots of awards. Last year’s breakout movie was “Hurt Locker,” the least-viewed Oscar winner ever. The year before that, “Slumdog Millionare” nearly went straight to DVD before being rescued by enraptured festival audiences. This year, “Winter’s Bone,” is that greatest movie you haven’t heard of yet; a backwoods film-noir about a teenage girl’s search for her crank-cookin’, bail-jumpin’ daddy through the hardscrabble underworld of the Ozark Mountain meth business. “Winter’s Bone” is like a cross between “Breaking Bad” and “Deliverance,” with a little “Chinatown” thrown in for good measure.

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is up against it in every part of her life. Living in the butt-end of Missouri where the state bird is a rusted pick-up on cinder blocks, she’s had the responsibility for her dirt-poor family dumped into her lap at 17.  Her father, Jessup, has disappeared as his trial for cooking meth approaches, an action that turns her mother into some kind of functional catatonic. Ree’s left to take care of her life-addled mom and her younger brother and sister in a freezing shack on a ragged woodlot.  As if things weren’t dismal enough, it turns out dad put up the pitiful family farm as collateral for his bail. When he skips his court date, Ree and her family are told they have a week before their home will be pulled out from under them and they have to go “…sleep in a ditch somewhere.”

Ree bravely face the soul-crushing trials of her life with the unflinching resolve of someone who has no other choice. “I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back,” she tells her frightened siblings. She sets out on a desperate track for Jessup, poking a stick under every rock in this bleak,  bitter landscape to find her fugitive daddy.

In this neck of the woods, the drug business is run by a redneck Mafia stocked with Ree’s extended family.  But as Ree navigates this treacherous maze of meth labs and second-cousins twice removed she finds that while blood may be thicker than water, in this world, meth has twice the viscosity of blood. When she comes asking, her relatives either lie to her face or threaten her life. No matter how much they might want to help one of their own, no one will talk:  “…Talking just causes witnesses,” she’s warned.

Only her dad’s creepy brother Teardrop (John Hawkes) is willing to help, mostly by warning Ree to quit looking. He’s a menacing, hair-triggered tweaker given to terrifying, unpredictable violence but, in this world, he’s one of the nice guys.

This movie bristles with a palpable sense of menace and drug-fueled paranoia.  The Ozark scenery, which in another film might seem bucolic, here brittles with malice and cold. As Ree’s quest drags her further and deeper into this heart of backwoods darkness, dread seems to bubble up out right of the landscape.  Danger lurks behind every rock and at the end of every country road.  A creeping sense of anxiety and suspense inhabits even commonplace scenes: the simple tableau of three women in a boat takes on the ominous vibe of Macbeth’s Witches rowing across the river Styx.

Throughout the entire perilous journey, it’s Jennifer Lawrence’s brilliant breakout performance that gives this movie its power and focus. Clear-eyed and full of grit, she can’t and won’t take no for an answer. Even in the face of overwhelming danger and insurmountable obstacles, her simple pragmatism never wavers.  She’s tough beyond her years in facing down her killer cousins, and finds the love in teaching her five year-old sister how to shoot, gut and fry a squirrel.

As Teardrop, John Hawkes manages to be both creepy and magnetic. Now that Dennis Hopper has passed, this performance shows Hawkes is the heir apparent to his signature roles as the sympathetic sociopath.

“Winter’s Bone” is first rate storytelling, a tense, unnerving thriller that that never stops ratcheting up the suspense. So don’t be surprised when this film that few people have heard of becomes the movie everybody’s talking about.