ongoing

  The feel-good movie of the summer? Yep, that’s “Winter Bone,” if you’re like the character in Lou Reed’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” when he sings “down for you is up.” “Winter Bone,” which took Best Picture last year at Sundance, is a grim, quietly relentless portrayal of a life and lifestyle not too many of us know to well. A meth-making family in the Ozarks, who’ve been ground down by poverty but still getting by, well, due to that poor-man’s coke concoction, which skilled entrepreneurs can make it home.
    As the movie - directed by Debra Granik and co-written by her and Anne Rosellini, adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel - begins, a teenaged Ree Dolly (played by Jennifer Lawrence) is facing quite a quagmire: Her father, Jessup, has been nailed by the law for his role (whatever that may be) in the meth-making, and faces trial. Thing is, he’s posted the family house as bail and has disappeared. If he doesn’t show up in court, there goes the homestead, ramshackle as it is. This is all Ree, her two young siblings, and her out-of-it mother have.
    Ree’s task is to try and track down her father’s whereabouts or if not that his body. This takes her from relative to relative, across this bleak terrain and she encounters both welcoming and hostile reactions to her quest. It’s clear her husband has aggravated the other members of the family business and increasingly apparent they might have something to do with his disappearance.
    One problem with “Winter Bone’ is it never shows the operation, the guts of what these people do. It’s at the heart of the story, but always in the shadows. We do see Ree’s uncle John Hawkes using the company product, but his use seems – against all movie tradition, moderate, and it does not make him spin out of control. (This in a day where nearly all hard drug use in movies leads to death or despair. So points for upending the stereotype.) Does it make him a better person or just more alert? Hard to tell, but his evolution from a potential figure of evil to, well, something else is one of the movie’s rewarding quirks.
     The actors in this movie, like those in the classic hillbilly-gone-bad movie “Deliverance,” do truly seem to be real-life people (and some of them are locals, non-actors). They’re beaten, mangy, surly. Don’t’ cotton to outsiders or people with badges much. They don’t have any connection to the outside world. (You kind of wonder how they get their product to the street?) You’ll see no computers and cell phone here. Heck, not even a TV. This isolation, you gather, must be by choice. (Where does their meth money go? The stock market? A Ponzi scheme? Maybe that’s why they’re still down and out.)
    This extended family has something between fierce pride and beaten-down acceptance of their fate. Their life will get no better; they will make no attempt to change it; they just try to control what they can. And, in this space of time, that would mean controlling access to the information about Jessup.
    For all the potential danger and damage, “Winter Bone” is a rather even-keeled affair. It’s not a movie of high drama. It’s got a low-key tension built into it. One curious thing is there are no flashbacks to Jessup – no idea of how he got in his predicament or what kind of person he is. So, it’s a little harder to identify with Ree’s quest, because we don’t’ know exactly what sort of father she’s seeking. But maybe that’s just the landscape. It doesn’t matter. To her, he represents their only shot of not being homeless. (She does attempt to join the military at one point and – here’s something on the Army’s side – the recruiter gently turns her away when she reveals the circumstances of her interest. Nope, they’re not enlisting everybody.
    Your enjoyment of “Winter Bone,” I suspect, depends on how much you can relate to this barren landscape and these harsh, hard people. It probably goes without saying that this $2 million indy isn’t going to give you the Hollywood bang at the end. You may not be completely surprised at the outcome, but there are enough suggestions along the way so that when it comes, you’ll go, “Yep, that makes sense.” As to what becomes of Ree and the Dollys? “Winter Bone 2” anyone?
At the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Tickets: $9.75.

290 Harvard St., Brookline, 617-734-2500 www.coolidge.org