Winter's Bone ending explained
Winter's Bone spends ninety minutes refusing to answer the question it raises, then resolves it in a scene on a frozen pond. Here's what the final act actually settles, what the money and the banjo mean, and the one thing the film deliberately never tells you.
Ree Dolly spends the film asking a question everybody around her already knows the answer to. When she finally gets it, the answer arrives with a chainsaw and a burlap sack over her head.
Debra Granik's 2010 film, adapted with Anne Rosellini from Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel, cost $2 million and took $16.1 million. It won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance in January 2010, and took four Oscar nominations at the 83rd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for John Hawkes and Best Actress for Jennifer Lawrence, who at 20 was then the second-youngest nominee in the category. Spoilers follow.
What Ree is actually up against
Seventeen-year-old Ree is raising her twelve-year-old brother Sonny and six-year-old sister Ashlee while caring for her mother Connie, who is catatonic. Her father Jessup, a meth cook, has vanished after signing the family house and timber land over as collateral on his bail bond. If he doesn't appear in court, they lose everything.
The bondsman is clear about the terms. Ree is equally clear about the logic.
"Dollys don't run," she tells him. If Jessup hasn't shown up, Jessup is dead — and she needs to prove it.
Asking around gets her beaten by the women of Thump Milton's family. Her uncle Teardrop (Hawkes) pulls her out, gives a guarantee that she'll cause no more trouble, and tells her Jessup was killed because he was going to inform on other cooks. He doesn't know who did it, and warns her that finding out is its own problem.
The pond
Merab and her sisters — the same women who beat her — come to the house with an offer. They put a sack over Ree's head so she can't identify the route, drive her out, and row her to a shallow spot on a frozen pond.
Jessup is under the ice. They make Ree reach into the water, take hold of her father's hands, and cut them off with a chainsaw, because fingerprints are what the authorities will accept as proof of death. She does it.
That scene is the film's entire resolution, delivered by the people who were the obstacle. They aren't being kind — they're closing a problem that has started attracting attention.
The money, and why the sheriff matters
Ree takes the hands to Sheriff Baskin and tells him someone threw them onto her porch overnight. He agrees to send them for identification. Teardrop has already implied to Baskin's face that it was Baskin who leaked the fact that Jessup had turned informer.
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The bond is discharged and the house is safe. The bondsman then hands Ree the cash portion of the bond, which an anonymous associate of Jessup's had put up and will not be claiming. She ends the film with the roof over her siblings' heads and money she never went looking for.
The banjo
Teardrop comes by with baby chicks for the children and picks up Jessup's banjo. He plays a few bars, then puts it down, saying he never had the gift for it the way his brother did.
Ree tries to give him the banjo. He tells her to keep it at the house for him — a man arranging where his things should be. On his way out he tells her he now knows who killed Jessup. He doesn't say who, and he doesn't say what he intends to do.
Everything about the exchange says he isn't coming back for the banjo.
Sonny asks Ree whether she'll leave now that there's money. She tells him she'd never do that. Ashlee hands Ree her chick, picks up the banjo, and strums the open strings.
What the film refuses to tell you
Three things are never confirmed on screen: who killed Jessup, what Teardrop does with that information, and who anonymously put up the cash. Granik keeps all three off camera, which is consistent with a film where the rule is that you don't say things out loud.
For the record: most of the supporting cast were first-time actors from the surrounding area of the Missouri Ozarks, and the production built no sets — every house on screen was somebody's house.
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