A young
girl, to avoid her house being repossessed, needs to find her missing father.
This is an
hard, unflinching, movie. The setting is the Ozarks, a mountainous region
between Missouri and Arkansas. Already a very hard place to live the meth
diffusion in the area, the protagonist father is a meth cooker, makes it
literally unforgiving.
This movie
is essentially all about the odyssey of this young girl, she’s only 17, who
have to confront a patriarchal culture to save her house and her family. Nothing
to gory happens on screen but the violence, first threatened and then overtly
expressed, is ever present. It’s a literal round trip through hell.
It’s all anchored on the determination of the
protagonist and Jennifer Lawrence, who got a deserved Oscar nomination out of
it, manages to be the rock hard mountain girl who shows just enough for us to
be sympathetic with her.
The direction
is assured and precise, it doesn’t escape from the more violent aspects of this
culture but at the same time it doesn’t relish those either. It’s mainly
interested in telling a good, tough story.
In the end
I know that it doesn’t sounds like the fell good movie of the year but the pure
spunk of our heroine carries us trough, we never feel desperation because she
is always striving for something better, even against insurmountable odds. That’s
the reason this movie never falls in the trap of the “Angst-ploitation” movie a
la “Precious” that are more interested in the issues that they want to raise
compared to the eventual story.
An
excellent drama, recommended viewing.
No comments:
Post a Comment