Frozen River

(2008)

Directed by

Courtney Hunt

Review by Zach Saltz

Frozen River is not as deadpan a look at small-town life in the northern United States as, say, Fargo, but then again there are very few films that even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Fargo.  Indeed, the best qualities of Frozen River are some of the same great qualities as Fargo: Delicate, simple, economical storytelling profiling the painfully real problems of painfully real problems.  Hollywood tends to abhor glorifying not having enough money to pay the cable bills.  Indeed, one of the most anticipated moments in the film occurs when we find out if its protagonist was able to be promoted to a full-time worker at the Yankee Dollar.

This protagonist’s name is Ray Eddy, though I was only able to identify two moments in the film when her name was referred to directly.  Near broke with two sons, aged 15 and 5, with a husband who has taken the car and all the cash, only weeks before Christmas, Ray finds herself in dire straits.  Even more distressing is when she finds her husband’s car parked outside of a building advertising “High Stakes Bingo” (a staple of sleepy Northern towns with little other ways of keeping its citizens occupied outside of drugs and booze).  She follows it and confronts the driver of the vehicle, a young Mohawk woman by the name of Lila (Missy Upham).  The two women, though outwardly hostile toward each other (especially after Ray shoots a hole through Lila’s trailer), soon strike up an agreement: They will use Ray’s car to transport illegal aliens from Canada into the United States.  After all, the frozen patch of river they will be crossing is not under the federal jurisdiction of the United States, but rather, the jurisdiction of the tribe elders.  The pay for the transports, though risky, is enough to enable Ray, initially reluctant to abide the passage of their human cargo, to pay for the new three-bedroom trailer she has promised her sons one too many times.

Like The Visitor, Frozen River manages to portray characters involved with the act of illegal immigration without making any significant political statements advocating or condemning it.  The only point of the film that comes remotely close to socio-political commentary comes when a flabbergasted Ray discovers that the aliens have paid in the upwards of $40,000 for safe passage into the States.  Having been unable to provide a steady income and affluent lifestyle as a naturalized white woman no less, Ray underscores one of the major themes of the movie, which is that mere entrance and settlement in the United States does not guarantee the lavish lifestyle promised by wondrous success stories surely told to eager and desperate foreigners worldwide seeking a new beginning.  On the contrary, the United States is a country racked with problems.  Indeed, clearly evident too in the movie is the ongoing hostile tensions between the whites and the native Mohawks of the small community.  Upon hearing that a Mohawk woman has taken his father’s car, Ray’s oldest son, DJ, immediately offers to “go kick some Mohawk ass.”  The film’s writer-director, Courtney Hunt, has a keen ability to recognize the subtle antagonism of untrusting, skeptical people forced to inhabit the same environment.

The performances in this movie work.  Melissa Leo belongs in what I shall call the Richard Jenkins Category of actors: Men and women with recognizable faces you’ve seen a dozen times in various motion pictures, but never landing substantive enough roles garnering significant name recognition among the move-going populous.  The role of Ray Eddy is so excellently played that Frozen River should become the film to put Ms. Leo’s name on the proverbial “map.”  An opening scene involves a close-up of her taciturn and pensive face, only to see streams of tears fall from her eyes once she blinks them.  Another excellent scene involves her and Lila (a noteworthy performance in its own rite), as they discuss their callous and manipulative husbands, both of whom have left them with the undue burdens of unpaid bills and unfed children.

Frozen River is not a movie like Crash where disparate and flawed characters of different races bond through unpredictable circumstances.  What Ray and Lila do in Frozen River is done purely out of mutual desperation; this even includes the way the two stand up selflessly for one another by the end of the picture, not out of kinship, but a shared effort to conceal the ramifications of their flawed actions and soon return to “normal” life.  While on the surface the river in this motion picture represents the barriers between citizenship and illegality, the true barrier here is the unseen domestic fence between two cultures which, after having been forced to live side-by-side for several generations, have yet to come to grips with their differences and ingrained enmity toward one another.

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