Winter Bone (2010) BBC 2 10.45pm

Winter's Bone based an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel of the same name. I had to look that bit up on the internet. Quite simply the film has pushed to the top of my must read books. Of course I’ve got must read books and must, must read books and books I’m ashamed I’ve not read (most nineteen century novels). Written and directed by Debra Granik, the film stars Jennifer Lawrence as a seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly Jessup, in the rural Ozarks who shoots squirrels to eat and feed her twelve-year old brother Sonny and six-year-old sister Ashlee. This is the kind of backwoods’ living that David Cameron wants to impose on the poor people in Britain, issuing each with a Dianna 2.2 gat and six lead pellets a week to live on and also solving the problem of too many grey squirrels. Her dream is to join the US army to make money and have a different sort of life. But she has responsibilities. Her mother has some kind of mental illness. We’re not told what, but from her friends and neighbours we pick up medication doesn’t help. Jessup, her father, is the source of her problem. He’s put up the shack they live in and the trees they hunt from as a bond, for appearing in court on a charge of cranking out crank (speed). Meths production, in these backwoods, seems to be as much part of the local economy as moonshine used to be. She’s got a week to find Jessup or she loses family and homestead to those that covered the bond. Her uncle Teardrop Dolly (John Hawkes) who continually snorts speed is both a help and a hindrance in a community where protecting blood and kith and kin has its own rules, especially when everyone is distantly related.