What Glenn Beck could learn from 'Winter's Bone'

At his Restoring Honor rally, Glenn Beck stood before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, urging Americans not to fall for the liberals' trap of gazing only at their country's "scars," but to instead remember what has made the nation great.

Indeed, it is a common refrain among "progressives" to trash America's past as a way of perpetuating the myth that all their reforms and revolutions are actually making the country a better place.

As I reported for WND, Hollywood celebrities swooned, for example, over Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," because the educator's book and curriculum paints American history as an epic march of victims seeking to shrug off the shackles of the warmongering, racist, capitalist, imperialist United States.

From this conviction that America is still evolving from its primordial ooze of conquest, slavery and wickedness flows the plethora of films (like Zinn-loving Matt Damon's "Green Zone") that focus on how horrible it is to live in – as fellow movie critic Michael Medved says – "the greatest nation on God's green earth."

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In the lefty arts and media culture, therefore, it is considered more "enlightened," more "intelligent" to appreciate films that swim in the pools of American depravity than to enjoy movies that celebrate her excellence. Let's just say, the movie critics are already writing their scathing reviews of "Captain America," and it hasn't even hit theaters yet.

So it was with great trepidation that I left the comfy confines of the big Cineplex this weekend – for the major movie studios often just dump their leftovers this time of year, leaving no new, widely distributed movies worth seeing – to venture into the hallowed ground of lefty elitists, the "indie" movie theater, to see the critically acclaimed film "Winter's Bone."

I knew right away that I had joined a different class of cinema clientele.

Rather than soda and popcorn, the "indie" theater offered wine and lattes. Rather than kids gathered around video games in the lobby arcade, men with gray hair pulled back in ponytails sat around coffee tables on cushions and loungers of earthy tones.

My hoity-toity, artsy-fartsy alarm was going off big-time.

And, true to form, "Winter's Bone" painted a picture of a broken, backwards America, where the Heartland is populated by hicks with blackened teeth, rusty pickups and meth addictions. The film descended into the back woods, where family trees don't branch, where women cower before abusive husbands in broken-down trailer homes and where beer cans are considered fine kitchen décor. And, seriously, does the sun never shine in a Missouri winter?

And yet, somewhere in this slowly plodding, agonizingly grim movie, I must admit … a powerful story emerged.

"Winter's Bone" follows Ree Dolly, (portrayed brilliantly by Jennifer Lawrence) a 17-year-old girl whose mother is mentally ill and whose ex-con father has skipped bond on a drug charge, leaving her alone to raise two young siblings.

But when "the law" comes calling, looking for Daddy, Ree must try to track him down, or lose her home. Determined not to let her brother and sister be tossed to the streets or to her drug-dealing extended family, Ree pushes relentlessly to find her father.

But, it seems, all of her father's seedy contacts, even her own family members, are keeping a dangerous secret. They keep it so tightly, in fact, her own kin beats her to a pulp to stop her from finding out what happened to dear ol' Dad.

The film takes a few tense and terrifying turns before Ree defiantly overcomes the evil around her, a teenager standing alone as the only woman of character in the middle of a twisted family. Somehow, in the gray, gothic tones of this haunting film, a touching, even hopeful ending emerges.

It's not a movie forgotten quickly.

But is this ugly underbelly actually a true picture of life in the States? Or just another leftist piece of America-bashing "art"?

"Winter's Bone" is both … and neither.

See, I live not too far from where this film is set. As I look out my window in this tiny Midwestern town, I know there are hidden meth labs in the woods over yonder. I see daily the men and women like those in this film: addicted, abused, lost souls from broken homes, caught in rural, small-town life where certain familial clans – for good or ill – rule over decaying communities in self-perpetuating cycles of poverty. Their dilapidated pickups and thin, feral dogs dot real yards not too far from my own.

These are America's "scars." These are those who know very little of "the American dream" that Beck and Sarah Palin praised from the platform of the Restoring Honor rally. These people, this haunting picture, are real.

On one hand, Americans cannot afford the willful ignorance of dining only on suburban Cineplexes offering Manhattan-based romantic comedies. A "Winter's Bone" can be a powerful reminder that we don't live in a Disney movie, that there are real, hurting people in this country trapped in drugs and despair.

On the other hand, the Hollywood left has created an unfair vision of an America as bleak as "Winter's Bone," where art is only called intelligent if it portrays rust, gray and black instead of red, white and blue.

I commented when I left the theater that if lefty, elitist moviegoers were fed a constant stream of films like "Winter's Bone," it's no wonder the Matt Damons of the world have come to hate America.

But it's not "smart" or any more "true" to see the USA as merely a parade of victims; in fact, it is historically ignorant.

In this regard, at least, Beck was right. It is a distorted view to see America as a failed experiment simply because it has failed some.

Instead, we should remember and honor the founding principles of faith, hope and love, of liberty under the rule of law, of capitalism and individual responsibility, and of reverence for God – all the while never forgetting our nation's "scars," her failures and her lost souls, that we may employ what has made this nation great to heal those who have not enjoyed the fruits of her greatness.

In other words, it wouldn't hurt the Roger Eberts of the world to learn a little something from Captain America. And it wouldn't hurt the Glenn Becks to be humbled by "Winter's Bone."

Content advisory:

• "Winter's Bone" contains several instances of strong profanity.
• Sexuality is virtually absent from the film.
• "Winter's Bone" is rated R, however, for strong, disturbing and (though somewhat off-screen) gruesome violence. Ree's beating is bloody and realistic, while she is later treated for her injuries, with bloodshed. In a particularly horrific scene, a corpse's hands are cut from its body with a chainsaw. Though this is mostly heard and not seen, still, the severed hands are visible in a couple of shots. There are also a couple of gory scenes involving the skinning of animals for food.
• The film also contains several scenes of heavy drug use.
• Outside of spoken profanities, the film ignores religious and occult themes.