Frozen River

Tennessean writer/director Courtney Hunt has been quietly critical of the mainstream film industry’s glamorisation of blue-collar America. We need only recall the ball-busting, cleavage-wielding antics of Erin Brockovich to see why. In her timely debut feature, Frozen River, Hunt puts her money where her mouth is, and muddies the filmic romance of American poverty with an arctic, washed out cinéma vérité.

The film begins with Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), a gambling addict who has been abandoned by her husband, finding herself destitute and unable to feed her two sons. While trying to track down her absent spouse she encounters Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a young native American woman who introduces her to a criminal underworld of smuggling immigrants from Canada across a frozen expanse of the St Lawrence river within the Mohawk reservation. Unsurprisingly, the stakes are as high as the financial rewards that fuel Ray’s desperate involvement, and it isn’t long before Ray and Lila’s plans go awry.

Frozen River scooped the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008, where jury member Quentin Tarantino excitedly described the film as “a wonderful depiction of America.” His praise was echoed at the Independent Spirit Awards, which acknowledged the film’s importance with a Best Actress win for Leo, and a Best Screenplay gong for Hunt. That this low-budget indie has garnered such critical attention – catapulting its lead from relative obscurity to dazzling limelight in the process – is no surprise, but it ironically embodies the very romance of the American Dream that the film so successfully interrogates.

And one can’t help but wonder how crucial the timing of Frozen River has been to its success. Certainly, the particular resonance the film has had for audiences across the globe cannot be separated from a timely concurrence with America’s economic meltdown. This was an historical moment at which the escapist gloss of an Erin Brockovich would have seemed misplaced. Unlike the flawless outline of Julia Roberts in her prime, the face of Melissa Leo’s Ray is a fabric on which hardship, disappointment and tenacity have weaved their brutal contours.

Yet it seems reductive and ungenerous to consign the film’s power to serendipity alone, or to limit its scope to an unflinching exposition of breadline poverty. Frozen River is also a taut, suspenseful thriller; a troubling of borders both cultural and national; and testament to the virtues of communion, empathy and compassion.

Emma Paterson

Anticipation:

The dark horse of last year’s awards season – you’ll want to know what all the fuss is about.

Enjoyment:

An ‘issue film’, yes, but also an edge-of-the-seat thriller with two women at the wheel.

In Retrospect:

Given its pertinence to the current political context, no doubt it will be hard to forget.