Winter's Bone comes awfully close to being great - it doesn't quite get there, but it's close enough. There's been a lot of focus on the poorer sides of the US in recent films -
Precious,
Frozen River etc - and this basically comes off as a movie based on a Gillian Welch song. 17-year-old Ree lives with her family in rural Missouri; but her drug-cooking father is on the run from the police and her mother has disappeared into clinical depression and it's up to her to take care of her two younger siblings. Then the sheriff shows up and tells her that her father put up their house as collaterol for his bail, and if she can't find him (or his corpse) within a week, they'll be homeless. Slowly but surely, it turns into a low-key modern US version of
The Proposition, with none of the bloodbath (well, almost none) but a similar haunting soundtrack and impossible moral dilemma; which part of your family do you sacrifice when the full weight of your father's sins are visited upon you, and everyone's too busy trying to survive to be able to help each other out? The director might be a tiny bit too fond of mountain-life stereotypes (does
everyone here own a banjo?) but for the most part, it's a wonderfully bleak, heartrending little film.
+
Frozen, on the other hand, has the same wintry theme but very little else. Three supremely annoying college kids are dumb enough to sneak onto a ski lift at night, and now suddenly they're trapped on a bench 10 metres up, night is falling, and it's 20 below. Oh, and the ski resort just closed for five days, too. Not really a bad idea, but poorly executed (if I'd realised the director also made the piss-poor
Hatchet, I probably wouldn't have bothered). Basically a remake of
Open Water with snow instead of ocean and wolves instead of sharks, except that it depends even more on our protagonists acting like idiots and crying about how they're never going to get home again. Which, in a way, together with the actually rather horrifying premise is rewarding enough to make the movie worth watching with one eye. But only just.