Ree Dolly’s journey is a perilous one.
In the richly atmospheric indie drama “Winter’s Bone,” the 17-year-old Ozarks native sets out on a quest when her ex-con father goes missing, having put up the family home and the age-old Missouri woods for part of his bond. Someone with a bag of crumpled bills covered the rest.
Jessup Dolly is a gifted cooker of crank, a magician of the backwoods meth lab. Wherever he’s gone, there are folk who don’t care for Ree’s dogged search to find him. But the determined Ree (Jennifer Lawrence in a breakout turn) has two young siblings and a mother whose mind is slowly unraveling. The hardscrabble cabin is all they have.
Yes, Ree Dolly embarks on a fraught hunt. She’ll run up against the muscular rebuffs of distant kin as she makes her way down hollows and up hills.
But that’s not the peril we’re talking about.
Director Debra Granik faced a different set of challenges in choosing to shoot Daniel Woodrell’s powerfully poetic novel, adapted by Granik and producer Anne Rosellini, in the Ozarks. After all, “Winter’s Bone,” which opens in theaters here Friday, deals with mountain folk and drugs; it’s peopled with rough, edgy characters who have plenty of twang and even more suspicion.
How does a production avoid being an interloper as well as a potential purveyor of stereotype? How does an outsider ready people for their turf’s close-up when screen depictions of their lives often truck in images of the hillbilly, the redneck?
“You can’t go into an area with such an intense history and lore and not lock horns with symbols, cliches, stereotypes and sensitivities,” the director has said.
“To approach filming in a region you’re not from, it’s by permission only,” she adds, calling from Los Angeles.
The courtship of the citizens of Taney County happened “in a series of approaches to that community by a guide from that community,” says Granik. People were given Wood- rell’s novel. Then Richard Michael, a location scout and Ozark guide, would gently nudge property owners toward opening their pastures, ponds and paddocks to the production. “The permission was slow in coming, and we had to earn it,” says Granik.
Another consultant was Marideth Sisco. The musician-folklorist-journalist can be seen (and better, heard) as she sings a honeyed, haunting rendition of “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,” in a scene in which Ree interrupts a birthday singalong.
“Winter’s Bone” is at once authentic and monumental. Not epic in terms of overblown production values but in the sense that Ree is a heroic figure. Think Antigone with the steely gumption to survive.
“She’s the best female role I’d ever seen in all my time being an actor,” says Lawrence. The 19-year-old has already shown a predilection for roles requiring grit: She portrayed a teen struggling for some form of stability in a damaging, dangerous home in Lori Petty’s drama “The Poker House” and the furious daughter of a cheating mother in last year’s “The Burning Plain.” She also played daughter Lauren on TBS’s “The Bill Engvall Show.”
Although the 19-year-old splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles, she was born and raised in Louisville, Ky. Or, as Ree says, “bred and buttered.”
During Lawrence’s audition, Granik liked “the way she pronounced the script right out of the gate,” recalls the director. “Her own beautiful lilting pronunciation was very convincing for me and wasn’t something I could provide an actor.”
In January, “Winter’s Bone” won Granik the best director award at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004, she garnered the same kudos for her debut feature, “Down to the Bone,” about a drug addict’s precarious journey toward sobriety. As with “Winter’s Bone,” that film also drew attention to an up-and-coming performer: Vera Farmiga (“Up in the Air”).
For a very brief spell Granik considered using upstate New York as a woodsy stand-in for Missouri’s Ozark region. To get financing, indie filmmakers need plans B, C and D when it comes to locale.
Thank goodness for the loamy, haunted, fighting spirit of Ree Dolly she didn’t need them.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. At blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer. @ denverpostfilm on Twitter.
