Film Review / Tim Krause
Living Degree Zero
Melissa Leo and Misty Upham in Frozen River
Frozen River, written and directed by Courtney Hunt
If you’re tired of the humectent summer blockbuster season, which this year dripped with ever-more perfect CGI monstrosities and was awash with ever-more soggily portentous superheroic significance, take a trip to Courtney Hunt’s splendid, tough Frozen River, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2008, and currently playing at the Angelika Film Center. Written and directed by Hunt, Frozen River tells the story of Ray Eddy (played with steely reserve by Melissa Leo), who, as the movie begins, is in a lot of trouble: her husband Troy, a gambling addict and substance abuser, has just run off with the money the couple had saved for their much-needed new trailer home; the money she makes at her dismal part-time job at the Yankee Dollar isn’t enough to pay the bills; and her two sons, T. J. (Charlie McDermott) and Ricky (James Reilly), are becoming increasingly estranged from her. While looking for Troy, Ray soon meets Lila Littlewolf (played by newcomer Misty Upham), a Mohawk woman who steals Troy’s car from the aptly-named Territorial High Stakes Bingo and who runs a high-stakes territorial game of chance on her own, smuggling illegal aliens from one Mohawk reservation in Canada across the frozen St. Lawrence River to another Mohawk reservation in Massena, New York. Ray soon becomes entangled in Lila’s smuggling schemes, first because Troy’s car has the kind of pop trunk that Lila requires for her jobs, and second for the money Lila shares with her.
There’s quite a lot to admire in Frozen River, not least the foreboding, desolate, haunted landscape of Massena, the reservation, and environs, a landscape of dilapidated homes, abandoned automobiles, and tiny, struggling businesses, a landscape of lowering gray skies, dead grass, and rust; like one of the nether bolgias of Dante’s hell, a world of snow and ice and mud. Hunt’s camera catalogs these details endlessly, pausing often on especially poignant moments — like the foot-powered merry-go-round in front of Ray’s trailer, dilapidated and unusable, and which angry T. J. is always trying to fix; or a prospectus flyer from Ray’s unscrupulous realtor that enjoins naïve customers to “LIVE THE DREAM” of owning their own home; or the look of weak winter evening light, dully yellow-orange, like a faded bruise on the aluminum siding of Ray’s trailer — that underline the material and spiritual poverty of the film’s characters. The acting is generally excellent, with only brief lapses into melodrama or overstatement: Hunt handles the largely new cast well, with only T. J. and Ricky sometimes failing to hit the necessary note of grim desperation or panicked fear. (That they bear an unfortunate characterological and physical resemblance to the fictional sons of Mary Louise Parker’s Nancy Botwin, another single American mom-criminal, on Showtime’s puerile comedy Weeds, doesn’t help.)
Especially good is Michael O’Keefe as Trooper Finnerty, who repeatedly warns Ray about her relationship with Lila, but whose motives and emotions are inscrutable: is he merely an implacable agent of the law, or something more, a caring human being amid the snowy wastes? Frozen River’s plot is also great, with Ray’s repeated trips across the river acquiring mythic status as journeys into darkness and the unknown: on one trip, the dramatic and emotional climax of the film, Ray shepherds across a Pakistani couple with a baby; because the voyage happens on Christmas Eve, the Muslim family takes on the ironic roles of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus — one of the best, subtlest tweakings of American xenophobia and nativism I’ve seen in recent years, made all the better by Ray’s frank dislike and fear, bordering on racism, of the couple. Ray is quite sanguine about ferrying Chinese and Mexicans across the St. Lawrence, but her difficulties with the Pakistani couple, and Hunt’s courage for including this subplot in the narrative, allows Frozen River to articulate larger, more sweeping themes through the prism of Ray’s crabbed, hardscrabble life.
Finally, it’s refreshing to see such an unpretentious, uncynical (i.e., free of Hollywood bullshit) portrayal of the realities of lower middle class and poor rural life in America. An upstate boy myself (though not so far as the snows of Massena!), I was incredibly pleased that Hunt nails both the precise visual look and the exact emotional register — stark and bleak but filled with a sharp, stripped-down beauty — of what upstaters like myself call the “North Country,” a world completely unlike that of urban and suburban New York: a world of hardships and physical labor, of bankruptcy and forfeiture, of poverty and addiction and casual crime; but a world still filled with magic and wonder, with dark forests and deep snows and vast open spaces, alive with the thrills of danger, adventure, and transgression.
These archetypal, mythic qualities are embodied by the frozen river of the title, the St. Lawrence, which is as much a character in the film as the “strong brown god” of the Mississippi is in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, another classic American tale of transgression and escape. The river is an unstable, dangerous bridge over which Ray must repeatedly travel in her quest for financial security, and whose thin ice could crack at any time — a perfect, simple metaphor for the precariousness of the middle class, and, indeed, the American Dream, in the final burned-out days of the Bush administration and the failed Republican Revolution.
I’m writing this review some twenty-four hours after the full-scale detonation of “Housegate,” the comic-pathetic revelation that Republican presidential candidate John McCain literally does not know how many houses that he and his billionaire heiress wife, Cindy, own. Here the blockbuster machine that is an election year in American politics merges eerily in my mind with Hunt’s small, spare, quiet — and, at ninety-seven minutes, mercifully short — film.
Both are tales of homes lost or about to be lost: McCain’s forgotten through the crass “let-them-eat-cake” noblesse oblige of a kept man and pathologically mercurial, self-destructive politician, a mental oblivion born of entitled carelessness and perhaps aided by a touch of senility or dementia; Ray’s endangered from the political and social costs incurred when rich, out-of-touch hucksters like McCain get into office, sink the public treasury in the sands of Iraq and in the pockets of corporate goons, and run the economy — and people like Ray and Lila — into the ground. There’s a lot of dark water under that river, and Hunt’s film is at its best when it shows the cracks — facilis descensus Averno — through which ordinary folks like you and me can fall into the icy depths below.
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