Frozen River

Writer/director Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, winner of the Special Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and Best First Film honors from the New York Film Critics Circle, is a stunning debut.
After years of self-congratulatory masturbation, ironic homogenization and artistic derailment, it is a reminder of what independent cinema once was and should be.
At the heart of its success are the performances of its two leading women, Oscar nominated Melissa Leo and Misty Upham.
Leo plays Ray, a spent piece of upstate New York trash whose life is spiraling downward due to financial woes caused by her absent, gambling addicted husband. She has two boys to raise and double wide payments to make. Her dead end job at Yankee Dollar does not provide a living wage and she’s beginning to see the money noose tighten from a variety of angles (her kids are eating popcorn and Tang for breakfast).
Upham is Lila, a twenty-something Native-American woman with troubles of her own. Her one year old son has been taken by her mother-in-law, her eyesight is bad and she too is stuck in a dead end job at the local bingo parlor on the Mohawk reservation.
Bleak? Hell yeah. Another helping of suffering for me please.
Through a strange interaction involving Ray’s stolen car the two women meet. Strained and contentious at first, their relationship forms out of mutual financial desperation. Lila knows people who smuggle illegal Asian immigrants across the Canadian border into the States. Ray has the preferred release hatch trunk on her car for such endeavors. They begin to play nice. And they begin to make money.
An unspoken bond grows between the two women but neither will openly confess to it. Upham and Leo do much with very little in the way of dialogue or scenario. They make a run, they split the cash, they sneer at each other and then agree to do it all over again.
The film is flawed here and there. The symbolism is crude and too easily structured. The ’frozen river’ metaphor has so many connotations that it’s almost rendered meaningless. There is a misstep with an immigrant baby, a credit card scam perpetrated by Ray’s teenage son and a blowtorch debacle. The film’s momentum is halted too often with ill chosen asides and the occasional dialogue clunk.
Its strength is in its gritty portrayal of people living on the fringes; in the sadness of Lila’s life on the Mohawk reservation (and the national shame accompanying those policies) and the luckless perpetuity of Ray’s poverty, regrettably enhanced by the indifferent Social Darwinism and corporatist greed of our culture. A particularly true and telling moment in the film is when we discover that Ray has been working at a retail outlet for two years yet will not be given full time hours (a ploy by retailers to avoid paying benefits and to keep employees fearful and struggling) or promoted to management. The question becomes not why do people become entangled in illegal activities but why do we continually force their hand to do so?
It is even more laudable that Hunt has written both characters with remarkably unlikable traits. Both women are racists, selectively ignorant, selfish and oh so quick to jump into the pit of bad judgment and self-defeatism.
Ray and Lila are the forgotten. The ones who do “fall through the cracks”. When you see muttering, crazy homeless women on the street, Ray and Lila are their precursors.
With the current financial crisis now hitting almost everyone, Frozen River acts as a reminder that for many in this land of plenty, bad times have always been the way of life.