Never been read harder than when my little brother saw this and said ‘I really liked it but YOU’LL love it’. This must be how some trans people felt seeing the Matrix, feeling seen, feeling called out, a generational disillusionment and a deep dysphoria acknowledged. But The Matrix is a power fantasy by directors who love to ape black aesthetics but hold a disdain for us, blame us. This is a cautionary tale, one full of empathy but good god I cannot be this.
I thought I had scheduled an appointment for this morning to talk to a provider about HRT. I spent the previous night wrapped in anxiety about what if things go wrong, what if they change for the worse, what if it won’t ’fix’ me, what if I talk to these people and they call me out, I’m not trans enough, I’m confused. It didn’t go through, I guess. They never called. I scheduled another in two weeks, got the email confirmation. And a part of me was relieved. Passed the buck down. A misunderstanding I can wash my hands of, a perfect excuse I could not be faulted for.
And then I saw this. As if to wash the doubt away. This hollowed me out. I feel raw and exposed and empty like it dug my heart out. I’ve been Owen. I am Owen. I don’t talk right, it’s hard to look people in the eyes, my skin doesn’t fit right, I feel hollow and I look in the mirror and often I see something disgusting and rotting. Owen in the ending is like my biggest nightmare put on screen. I got chicken tenders at the theater, I know, I’m a weirdo, and they asked for the name of the order and I used my birth name. Here. At no risk to me, nobody who knows me, I still couldn’t use Jaycee. I don’t use it at drive throughs. The name I chose, that the people I love and trust call me across the internet, that I use on the dating apps, I couldn’t use. Why? Because I don’t feel like I’ve earned it? Because it doesn’t feel time? There is still time.
I could say more about how this hits as someone who grew up on Buffy and Whedon shows for better and worse in high school despite being born a year before the show premiered, how it hits a nostalgia of a time I knew from behind the screen and then how time skips into now, like a shattering of the escape. I could talk about the attachment formed to a show before the Internet showed you all the fans who loved it like you, seeing yourself in it, projecting onto it what may not be there and reckoning with that as you grow. I could talk about Smith’s aching wound of a performance or Liddy-Paine’s killer monologue, or the breathtaking lighting and cinematography, but all I need to say is what I needed to hear.
There is still time. But that doesn’t mean there’s time to waste. I’m going to do that appointment. I’m going to use my name. I’m going to claw to who I want to be and who I am inch by inch. And like Owen, I may be alone when I take that path but I will be so relieved to be on it, I will know who I am, and that will be in part due to seeing the TV glow.
The setting becoming a character in a film is a cliche. It's easy to give in to the charms of talented production designers and themes rooted in a particular time and place and declare that a well-established center of events rises to the level of personhood within a story.
But this desolate den of thieves and junkies and ramshackle mobsters in the Ozarks is more than just a character in Winter's Bone, it is a visceral realization of the mood of the film. What I love most about this film is it's restraint. There are few grand scenes of exposition, only a couple of big moments, and little in the way of on-the-nose dialogue to explain who these characters are or what their hopes and wants and weaknesses will be. Instead, it finds other, subtler ways to convey character and conflict and stakes.
None of these is so potent as the surroundings that Ree Dolly finds herself in. While the camera rarely acquiesces to the stark if scenic beauty of the area, it takes time to linger on the dull gray and washed out colors of the Dollies' corner of the Ozarks. The desperation of this place, the lack of hope and the sense that the same patterns are doomed to repeat in its grizzled confines come through without anyone needing to say it.
More than anything, Winter's Bone gives us an ecosystem, a hierarchy, more through implication than by anyone laying it out for us. We see the way that the women of this area have to look to men for approval, and yet are the real muscle and motivators that solve the problems the story presents. We see the elaborate games of telephone, the way that honor must be shown and recognized, that drive the characters from one point to another. And we see the bonds of family, the way everyone in this town is some distant relation, and the difference between what that's supposed to mean and what it does.
That strength is matched by the film's lead. Jennifer Lawrence may have gone on to win Oscars and headline blockbusters, with many striking performances, but I'm not sure she's ever topped this one. The strength and resolve in Ree Dolly, as she pushes her way through the Byzantine spate of resistance and blind eyes that threatens to leave her family penniless and homeless, with her vulnerability on display in more private, intimate moments, creates an incredible portrait of a young woman in an impossible position. Lawrence masters the layer of the character: her boldness tinged with uncertainty on display as she stands up to the men and women who attempt to stymie her, her doubt and fear as she pleads with her shell-shocked mother for help, her anxiety and pragmatism as she tries to teach her young brother and sister to be self-sufficient.
It's that pragmatism, the quality that takes a young woman with clearly enough smarts to make her own way in this world, that spurs the film to its climax. There's a parallelism to it. When Ree is teaching her brother how to prepare a squirrel, she tells him to remove its guts, and he resists. She tells him that he has to do it anyway, that he has to get used to stuff like this. That thought comes back to bite Ree as she's forced to reach into the water and pull out her own father's bloated corpse while her antagonists and accomplices take off his hands with a chainsaw to provide proof of his death. She too resists, but swallows her disgust and horror and does what needs to be done. It's a testament to that desperation once again, to the idea that painful things have to happen, that the innocent have to be broken, at least a little, in order for them to survive in a world with such ugliness.
There's an undercurrent to this story about someone trying to break out of a system that aims to hold people like her in place. When she walks into the local high school she looks longingly at what goes on there. She tries to enlist in the military to see the world and get out. She is, however, tied to this place, by the need to take care of a mother and siblings who cannot, and in the case of the former, maybe never will, be able to take care of themselves. She is needed, and that means putting the rest of a promising life on hold, in a community that feigns support (with pride and reputation being prized), but which is deeply suspicious and uncaring when their livelihoods or positions are threatened.
The one ally who crosses this line is Teardrop, who is a part of this same system but breaks ranks to assist his niece in her honorable quest. John Hawkes gives the performance of a lifetime. A far cry from the clean cut Sol Star of Deadwood, Hawkes is the apotheosis of the thoroughly-worn creatures of walking regret who populate the film. His sunken eyes mask a long-buried warmth and connection to the world, that begin to reemerge in the face of Ree's struggle.
That struggle, in its way, is a very simply story. A young woman tries to find her dad in order to save her family. But the layers the film adds onto that basic premise -- the conspiracies of silence and of gossip that loom in the background, the filial and fraternal issues that permeate the story, the understated, frightening nature of the possibilities from poking the wrong hornet's nest in this town -- make into something affecting and universal. Winter's Bone is a film about one resourceful, pitiable young woman's efforts to complete her Herculean labors, but it's also about the community she labors within, and the place, bereft of hope or opportunity, that spawned it. That place, and its fallow environs, show the depths to which this land has sunk, but also, through Ree's indomitable spirit, Teardrop's renewed connection to his family that suggests the support that might set her free, and the windfall that acts as her father's final gift, there's the hint that what has lain fallow may be reborn, that there is hope in the midst of this unmitigated bleakness, and that those old, destructive patterns can be broken, if only a little.
