This review of Winter’s Bone isn’t flattering, but the comment at the end tells a much bigger real story that makes Winter’s Bone even more real.
February 16, 2011 – 4:21pm
I was born in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Watching this movie was, in many ways, like watching a story of many members of my family. Deep Generational poverty, wrapped in feuds over things that may have happened many many years before. Women who are there to serve the men, while still maintaining some kind of matriarchy. And drugs. And people having babies at 15, because everyone does it and school just isn’t that important when you are hunting squirrels to eat.
As such, it was raw. And I mean the kind of raw of chapped and bleeding lips.
It is also beautiful. Beautiful because some of us DO make it out, away, or through that background stronger, more powerful than our uncles or cousins imagined.
From a cinematography standpoint, the director got the look, sound and feel of the Appalachia perfect. The actors are also pitch perfect – some even looked like the men and women in my family.
It is not an easy movie to watch. I sobbed through the final parts, in fact. I mean SOBBED.
However, it tells a story of an America that is invisible or frequently mocked ( I can not tell you how many hillbilly jokes I have had to endure after telling people I was born in West Virginia). This story Americans living now is told in a quiet and intensely moving way.
Dawn Rouse
Writer, Thinker, Nap-Taker and almost Doctor of Education
Listen to or read the narrative of the latest installment of the classic Ozarks commentary by beloved Ozarks singer and storyteller Marideth Sisco, host of the long-running series, These Ozarks Hills.
my life and times 