On the Perils of Self-Induced Overhyping

Well, I seem to have done too much heavy duty thinking and pondering this evening, as I've reached one of those states of extreme philosophical introspection. Let's see what it does for a complex movie review, that of "Winter's Bone." I think I closed my last review mentioning that I was really excited for this movie; that's a bit of an understatement. Ever since I read about it in the Cannes reviews, I've been getting little-kid-before-Christmas excited for this movie. I tried to sell it to all my friends, I raved about it to my family, I criticized the trailer for being overly sensational without having ever seen the movie, and in general I developed a few too many expectations. So it was too late for me when I tried to take a more reasonable stance the evening of the movie, as I had already overhyped "Winter's Bone" to a point where I wasn't sure exactly how I'd feel about it. And I'm still not sure how I feel, in spite of certainty that it was a good movie.

I suppose it didn't help that I missed the first ten minutes, which led to a nagging feeling of having missed a good chunk of initial pacing. But my knowledge of the plot helped see me through the rest of the movie: Ree, a girl of about seventeen, looks after her two younger siblings in the chilly meth-cooking district of the Ozarks while her mother languishes with some kind of mental illness. Trouble (always trouble!) shows up in the form of a sheriff (or someone, this is the part I missed), informing Ree that her long-gone father was arrested and put their property up for bail. Long-gone meth-cooking fathers being what they are, Ree places little faith in the idea of him showing up for his court date, so she sets off through the neighborhood to try and find word of her daddy, so she can force him into showing up, thereby saving the house and her ability to care for the family. Another critic referred to her journey as a kind of Odyssey, and that's really stuck with me, so I'm pirating it right now: Ree's quest and the slightly creepy half-relative folks she has to deal with are... Odyssey-like? I really wanted to say Odysseus, but that hardly sounds right.

Cutting past that rambling, the story now takes off in the slow and subtle way of atmospheric mysterious journeys. Things unfold steadily, side-characters come and go regularly with their various agendas, and gradually everything takes the form of a world where life is a struggle and folks get by as best they can, which means keeping secrets and family ties equally strong. Danger abounds, of course, but Ree acquits herself admirably: she is played with a kind of matter-of-fact courage by Jennifer Lawrence, doing a fine job. But she does have a little help along the way, most notably from her Uncle Teardrop, played by John Hawkes. Teardrop was one of the better characters, in my humble opinion, an enigmatic man who seems to have mastered this cruel Ozark world through a combination of toughness and slight insanity. I'm starting to find it hard to describe things to y'all without possibly ruining anything, so let's cut the professionalism and get down to subjectivity. I thought this was a good movie; it moved at the slower pace that I like, especially when there are as many details and relationships floating around as there are here. Ultimately, I thought it all got down to be about the journey instead of the exact details of Ree's father (surprise!). It all boiled down to her ability to ultimately deal with the pressures of raising her siblings entirely alone and in the face of extreme adversity, and that took iron courage, something that you don't see relayed this convincingly much at all, especially not these days. And then there was the counterpart of Teardrop, who had already survived to the point of becoming entirely enmeshed in the adversity, something that I thought was especially moving in the closing scenes. Ree has to learn to rise above it all and deal, and Teardrop rose to the point where he had to come crashing back down.

But those are just my thoughts. What I really came here to try and talk about today is the idea of self overhyping, which is really what I think happened here with "Winter's Bone." Part of it is that I really wanted this movie to floor me, yet I walked out contemplative. Another part is that I found myself almost forcing joy and engagement to the point where I'm still not sure whether or not this was the movie or the idea of what I thought the movie was going to be. And this is tricky, especially for your run-of-the-mill aspiring movie critic. I want the truthful objectivity I had for "Micmacs," a movie I had heard was good from someone I trust. When you walk in with no expectations, you have a blank slate to chart your opinions on. But what of my marred slate for "Winter's Bone?" Truth is, I probably won't be able to figure it out until I end up re-watching it in a year or so, and hopefully then I won't be watching with an eye to please myself again. What I think we must do in this case is chalk the experience up with an asterisk: it was good, but a disappointment for strange internal reasons that have nothing to do with the film. The peril of self-induced overhyping is the excitement of anticipation, which contrasts sharply with the contemplative pleasure of a movie like "Winter's Bone."

I have rambled but good at this point, so I'm going to cut off abruptly and leave that last sentence as my last sentence. Movie review backlog has already developed, so expect one of "Exit Through the Gift Shop" as soon as I can motivate to do a decent job.