Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is one of those movies — like last year’s inner-city down-a-thon, Precious — that can’t quite make a distinction between profundity and plain old bleakness. The story of a 17-year-old girl in rural Missouri who’s desperate to find her ex-con father (he’s skipped bail, endangering not just the family’s modest house but its very survival), Winter’s Bone often feels stiffly self-conscious: Even though it’s based on a novel, it has the aura of a gritty documentary, as if Granik distrusted the idea that fiction alone could ever be good enough to get to the truth of human lives.
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REVIEW: Winter’s Bone a Little Too Pleased With its Own Folky Bleakness
