WINTER'S BONE

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NIhjnQz-xrA/SlmalGqqi7I/AAAAAAAAAQk/qKnVYg1lmas/s400/Shrug.jpg

i thought it was a de maupassant kind of thing: the hunt for her father is also the struggle for money & safety. by proving that her father can't be found, she gets the money

for some reason i thought that if person A puts up bail for person B, person B dying would mean that person A gets their money back. i didn't realize it would go to the next of kin of person B. or maybe i'm still not getting it. sorry to be so dense about a relatively uninteresting aspect of the movie but the plot kinda does pivot on it.

(also re: getting bailed out by your enemies who want you dead, surely a lesson should have been learned across america's entire criminal community by the events portrayed in the movie jackie brown and the book upon which it was based)

i thought that if person A puts up bail for person B, person B dying would mean that person A gets their money back

I think that's right but I'm pretty sure the marshal explains that person A basically walked into his office and plopped down a bag of money

they don't know who person A is so they give it to the next of kin. I think.

the marshal explains that person A basically walked into his office and plopped down a bag of money

that wasn't a marshal, it was the bail bondsman, right? and didn't he say something like "we took our cut and this is what was left" or something?

i guess the only way the money gets to rhee is through this loophole, when they don't know who originally put up that money, but in the real world there's no way bail gets granted without paperwork i don't think. even in missouri. sorry to be all plot-dickish but... it is kinda what the entire payoff of the movie depends on!

"paperwork" is pretty frequently a difference between the real world and the cinematic one, so it didn't really bother me - plus it had already been made clear the police were in cahoots with the community. and the bail bondsman def made clear what a lucky duck he thought she was.

really, as soon as the sheriff goes "welp, thanks for the fingers, you can go now" you can assume he's not worried about the paper trail

yes bail bondsman not marshal

in the real world there's no way bail gets granted without paperwork

I guess but they made pretty clear in the plot that whoever put up the money wanted to stay anonymous (for the reason talked abt upthread, most likely they wanted Jessup out of jail so they could kill him). maybe the only signature on the bail papers is the bondsman and whoever gave the bondsman the money doesn't really matter.

what the hell are you guys on about

Well, they said (if memory serves) that Jessup put up some of the money himself, leveraging the house, but that was hardly enough to cover bail; the rest came from the anonymous source. Tthey can't be talking huge sums of cash, but even modest bail would be a life-changing mountain of money in dirt poor Ozark terms.

eh. this was alright. don't get the fuss at all. was certainly a put on "stylized noir" thing (reading this grim, brooding seriousness as REAL LYFE is kind of lol). nothing wrong with that, but it did keep me emotionally distanced from whatever suffering this girl was going through.

That was my point upthread about the annoyingness of the stick of butter closeup: the director telegraphing LOOK SEE THEY HAVE NOTHING TO EAT when just a simple medium shot of the girl quietly looking for things to cook around the kitchen would have sufficed.

felt the same way about last tango tbh

no one explained to this country bumpkin the myriad ways in which one could put sticks of butter to use.

winter's boner

what the hell are you guys on about

we're talking about the plot of the movie

i feel like you have found the exact most boring thing about this movie to have an involved discussion about

the fact that the most boring thing was also the pivot of the entire plot and ALSO pretty unclear is unfortunate, i agree

ha

look it's pretty simple

boy meets girl
boy loses girl
boy gets girl back

what is there not to understand

man meets bad dudes
man loses life
girl gets man's hands back

what is there not to understand

what if her dad turned out to be the dude from 127 hours and that movie turned out to secretly be a prequel

woman sees injustice, hollers despite threats until corrupted system corrects itself just enough to shut her up - basically an erin brokovich thing

http://scienceblogs.com/isisthescientist/butter-stick.jpg

i liked that it was set in the present day and moved an engaging plot along without a single computer or mobile phone showing up.

except when she finds the hands cuz her father checked in on 4square

@swamp

great as advertised

keep thinking abt it

subtle class differentiations were v important: thinking of the bail bondsman's later model car, leather jacket

party w/laura palmer was a step up too - that scene was when i realized oh this movie is abt the culture of this one clan specifically

they more or less had their own world

people who have some toe-hold in the official economy kind of drift into the story and out again, sort of pityingly, almost apologetically. almost all of them are part of the enforcement state (the cop, the bondsman, the army recruiter)

the drug economy is very well understood in this movie i think -- both a productive engine and a parasitical machine that chews people up. you wonder what these folks would be doing if they weren't selling drugs to each other and doing them... and then the answer is probably not much

or "just living" to be more forgiving about it

anone know where exactly this took place, in the ozarks right, but was it specifically in some town or

the border of MI and AR is an impt part of the story -- love stuff like that, two jurisdictions, one population, interzone type shit. the place is probably ficionalized, but it did come from a novel right? i don't know.

all v otm btw xp i liked the 1st interaction between the bondsman when he realized fuck this is just a little girl in a horrible situation and softens up - interaction w/the recruter was kinda interesting too for his delivering good advice and sort of connecting while maintaing institutional distance

xxpost I was curious about this myself. fwiw IMDB says it was filmed in Branson, Missouri, USA & Forsyth, Missouri, USA.

i was also really hooked the insane mixture of ree's complete steely canniness (in her own environment) and total innocence and naivete w/r/t anything outside it -- thinking of the recruiter explaining that you don't just get the $40k for signing your name, we are shipping your country ass to iraq, ps no parents? really?

and doesn't that happen right before she teaches her siblings how to hunt squirrel?

Which I did think was too tidy an ending for a movie whose protagonist - despite being smart and tenacious - already more or less just had to stick around long enough and wait for everyone around her to suddenly help her despite repeatedly professing their disinterest in doing so. And, you know, in some cases trying to kill her.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, December 5, 2010 10:37 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i know everyones already piled on josh but this is just an egregious misreading of the plot - she doesnt just stick around waiting for people to help her - she spends the entire move acting in such a way that they will either have to kill her or give her her dad - its specifically what the movie is about

she figured correctly that delivering her dad would be less trouble legally and morally than killing her - this is aptly illustrated when teardrop takes the ax to guys windshield and he reacts saying 'were gonna bring hell down on you' - of course what the actual reaction is is to give in and give up evidence of her fathers death - news got back to thump and he was all 'dont really want to deal w/both these crazy fucks let just be done w/it whatevs'

as for everyone complaining abt the bail money - it really wasnt that big a deal or central to the plot and whatever paperwork requirements couldve been worked around in any number of ways - the main thing was keeping the house - i did feel like what it did was relieve teardrop of his responsibility to the family - allowing him to go on his suicide mission against whoever killed his brother

novel:

http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/winters_bone/

"border of MO and AR" i should say

MOAR

that delivering her dad would be less trouble legally and morally than killing her

But why, if they had no legal or moral trouble with killing her dad and leaving her to scramble?

Anyway, I get the movie's clan mentality, blood is thicker than water, etc. But the way the movie is set up and its characters /depicted introduced, there's a whole lot more killing that goes down after the credits roll. The guy who Teardrop thinks killed Jessup, then one presumes Jessup himself, then whoever told Teardrop who killed Jessup, and so on. Which of course would not have happened had Jessup not been killed in the first place, so perhaps the movie can be read as a take on what happens when you don't respect the bond of family, however tenuous.

Read somewhere that Lawrence had her teeth made-up/discolored, even though you never see her teeth in the film.

gender diffs also very impt -- i'm thinking of the scene where teardrop rescues ree, she's been beaten up, and he's ready to throw down right there at the sight of her hurt, but is assured that it's only the women who hurt her. the chain of revenge doesn't cross gender lines.

you get the sense that if ree were a young dude she just would have been shot early on.

her dad was snitching, which threatened the whole clan, therefor the legal risks of murder were worthwhile and the moral bond was disolved by his actions - with her the legal risks just werent worth it particularly considering it creates a pattern and points directly back to thump et al via everyone knowing she was out harassing them - morally shes just a little girl trying to save her family and shes shown tremendous heart and bravery, criminal enterprises depend on both fear of retaliation and the bond of loyalty, shes exactly the person whos murder would degrade group loyalty - add that to the fact that everyone is clearly deathly afraid of teardrop and its just easier to give her a hand(s)

Re the bail bond: I think the accused person contracts with the bond agent him- or herself, and that person is responsible for putting up the money. So the anonymous donor was really giving the $$ to Ree's dad who then gave it to the agent = the agent will return it to Ree's dad, who will owe it, by personal commitment, to his benefactor. That loan is none of the agent's business.

A bail bond can be co-signed by someone on the accused's behalf, but in that case the benefactor's identity is required, legally. You know the benefactor only bailed him out so they could kill him, so guaranteed that person needed to stay anonymous and can never come looking for the money, therefore see Paragraph 1.

I thought this movie was great.

Rewatching this now. Every bit as good as I remembered. The people who think this film over-amps the milieu -- rural culture, poverty, etc -- are 1. misreading the movie a little and 2. apparently haven't spent much time in places like this (which is fine since most people haven't).

1. A key scene that goes without enough notice is when Ree walks the kids to school and hangs around watching other teens her age go through the high-school motions. They aren't taking AP classes, they're taking Home Ec and ROTC, but it establishes that Ree's life isn't the norm even in this pocket of the Ozarks.

2. My dad and stepmom -- who both grew up in rural Arkansas (not in the Ozarks, but they have experience with that area too) -- watched this recently. When the scene of Ree teaching the kids to skin and clean squirrel happened, they looked at each other and said, "We've done that." The only thing that seemed off to my dad was that the family lived in a log house, which he thinks would have been too expensive for them.

My stepmom remembered a moonshiner buying sugar from her father's store. This guy ended up going to prison, coming out, and switching to marijuana. Today he'd be on to meth, probably.

From my own time in that area, the visuals - stray dogs, rusting cars, trampolines in the side yard -- are spot-on.

Final note: For whoever was complaining about the "stick of butter" upthread -- it wasn't a stick, it was a tablespoon full. She's frying potatoes. This is normal.