Frozen River
Written & Directed by Courtney Hunt
British filmmaker Mike Leigh, who has demonstrated some genuine feeling for underclass life (Hard Labour, Secrets and Lies, All or Nothing), told me he once reprimanded an art director who decorated the set of a poor family’s home by “dirtying up” the doorframes. Leigh barked, “Are your doorframes at home smudged? Then why would these be? These characters have self-respect.” A polite way of describing what’s wrong with Frozen River, the new indie film about underclass life, would be to call it Smudged-Doorframe Cinema.
The threshold from which director-writer Courtney Hunt views her characters’ hard times makes them look more pathetic than necessary. Ray (Melissa Leo) mothers her 15- and 5-year-old sons after they were recently abandoned by her gambling-addict husband—and with Christmas around the corner! To get the family out of their Massena, N.Y., hovel that sits near the wintry Canadian border, and into a new doublewide trailer, Ray clerks at a Yankee Dollar outlet store. Her life is as rough as her ramshackle trailer and her frowned-up, tear-stained face.
Poverty makes Ray desperate; she’s downtrodden like the Mohawk Indians whose bingo parlor on the nearby reservation symbolizes everyone’s poor luck. Misfortune brings Ray in contact with Lila (Misty Upham), a young Mohawk single mother also used to scrapping and flouting the bigoted local police. Lila introduces Ray to the undercover business that smuggles illegal immigrants into the United States from Canada by driving across the frozen St. Lawrence River. Aside from being a film-school gimmick, slickly combining suspense with character-despondency, this law-breaking plot is primarily an example of Smudged-Doorframe condescension. It’s the most insulting story of its kind since that drug-mule movie, Maria Full of Dope. Frozen River combines melting-pot pity with economic shame and female depression.
At least the comic trio of female crooks in last spring’s Mad Money acknowledged their capitalist habits and the indoctrinated love of materialism. (Only Queen Latifah, the lone woman of color, expressed self-justifying piety—though not too much.) Writer-director Hunt doesn’t press Frozen River’s sisterhood angle too hard; and she’s sensibly reticent about resolving the ethnic tension that believably underscores her story of poor whites living among resentful Indians. But this woe-is-me vision feels just as rigged as a Pollyanna bromide. (And it’s especially unacceptable given the poetic realism of Kent Mackenzie’s recent restored Native American tale The Exiles.) Ray risks jail time (which would mean abandoning her children) seemingly just to confirm the filmmaker’s maudlin view of American privation. Ray’s need for a babysitter becomes a ludicrous reduction of “feminist” argument mixed with post-9/11 immigration issues.
From both Ray and Lila’s overburdened motherhood and oppressed femininity to the utterly joyless environment they share, Frozen River says little about the realities of American poverty and human subsistence. It merely proves how self-righteous middle-class filmmakers can be about the underclass. Ray’s nearly repossessed big-screen TV set shows a deliberate blur of inane programming—probably for copyright reasons—but Hunt misses the opportunity to reflect the out-of-joint culture of acquisition that oppresses Ray and Lila more than any Homeland Security rules. (The doublewide realtor’s office boasts a sign: LIVE THE DREAM.) It’s a bleeding-heart fantasy of how the poor scrape by—a Swiftian exaggeration of dire poverty such as the girls in Sex and the City might have: Ray feeds her boys a dinner of Popcorn and Tang (she doesn’t bother smuggling tuna fish, pickles or cake mix from her dollar-store job). Does Hunt eat Popcorn and Tang for dinner? Then why would these characters? When Ray eventually shows social consciousness, she discards the belongings of a Pakistani woman immigrant (“It might be a nuclear weapon”) only to discover an infant hidden in the duffel bag.
What Hunt does with this potential dead-baby joke makes for the year’s dreariest suspense sequence, inter-cut with the prospect of Ray’s kids burning down their trailer. There’s one poignant detail: Ray collects bottles of fancy bubble bath that she never opens. This symbol of a working-class woman’s pathetic ideas of luxury (and self-denial) is really a sign of a privileged filmmaker’s distance from reality. The photography throughout is dim and dark, often obscuring the details of crucial action. This visual miasma matches Leo and Upham’s thoroughly humorless commitment. Frozen River is one little piece of misery.
Written & Directed by Courtney Hunt
British filmmaker Mike Leigh, who has demonstrated some genuine feeling for underclass life (Hard Labour, Secrets and Lies, All or Nothing), told me he once reprimanded an art director who decorated the set of a poor family’s home by “dirtying up” the doorframes. Leigh barked, “Are your doorframes at home smudged? Then why would these be? These characters have self-respect.” A polite way of describing what’s wrong with Frozen River, the new indie film about underclass life, would be to call it Smudged-Doorframe Cinema.
The threshold from which director-writer Courtney Hunt views her characters’ hard times makes them look more pathetic than necessary. Ray (Melissa Leo) mothers her 15- and 5-year-old sons after they were recently abandoned by her gambling-addict husband—and with Christmas around the corner! To get the family out of their Massena, N.Y., hovel that sits near the wintry Canadian border, and into a new doublewide trailer, Ray clerks at a Yankee Dollar outlet store. Her life is as rough as her ramshackle trailer and her frowned-up, tear-stained face.
Poverty makes Ray desperate; she’s downtrodden like the Mohawk Indians whose bingo parlor on the nearby reservation symbolizes everyone’s poor luck. Misfortune brings Ray in contact with Lila (Misty Upham), a young Mohawk single mother also used to scrapping and flouting the bigoted local police. Lila introduces Ray to the undercover business that smuggles illegal immigrants into the United States from Canada by driving across the frozen St. Lawrence River. Aside from being a film-school gimmick, slickly combining suspense with character-despondency, this law-breaking plot is primarily an example of Smudged-Doorframe condescension. It’s the most insulting story of its kind since that drug-mule movie, Maria Full of Dope. Frozen River combines melting-pot pity with economic shame and female depression.
At least the comic trio of female crooks in last spring’s Mad Money acknowledged their capitalist habits and the indoctrinated love of materialism. (Only Queen Latifah, the lone woman of color, expressed self-justifying piety—though not too much.) Writer-director Hunt doesn’t press Frozen River’s sisterhood angle too hard; and she’s sensibly reticent about resolving the ethnic tension that believably underscores her story of poor whites living among resentful Indians. But this woe-is-me vision feels just as rigged as a Pollyanna bromide. (And it’s especially unacceptable given the poetic realism of Kent Mackenzie’s recent restored Native American tale The Exiles.) Ray risks jail time (which would mean abandoning her children) seemingly just to confirm the filmmaker’s maudlin view of American privation. Ray’s need for a babysitter becomes a ludicrous reduction of “feminist” argument mixed with post-9/11 immigration issues.
From both Ray and Lila’s overburdened motherhood and oppressed femininity to the utterly joyless environment they share, Frozen River says little about the realities of American poverty and human subsistence. It merely proves how self-righteous middle-class filmmakers can be about the underclass. Ray’s nearly repossessed big-screen TV set shows a deliberate blur of inane programming—probably for copyright reasons—but Hunt misses the opportunity to reflect the out-of-joint culture of acquisition that oppresses Ray and Lila more than any Homeland Security rules. (The doublewide realtor’s office boasts a sign: LIVE THE DREAM.) It’s a bleeding-heart fantasy of how the poor scrape by—a Swiftian exaggeration of dire poverty such as the girls in Sex and the City might have: Ray feeds her boys a dinner of Popcorn and Tang (she doesn’t bother smuggling tuna fish, pickles or cake mix from her dollar-store job). Does Hunt eat Popcorn and Tang for dinner? Then why would these characters? When Ray eventually shows social consciousness, she discards the belongings of a Pakistani woman immigrant (“It might be a nuclear weapon”) only to discover an infant hidden in the duffel bag.
What Hunt does with this potential dead-baby joke makes for the year’s dreariest suspense sequence, inter-cut with the prospect of Ray’s kids burning down their trailer. There’s one poignant detail: Ray collects bottles of fancy bubble bath that she never opens. This symbol of a working-class woman’s pathetic ideas of luxury (and self-denial) is really a sign of a privileged filmmaker’s distance from reality. The photography throughout is dim and dark, often obscuring the details of crucial action. This visual miasma matches Leo and Upham’s thoroughly humorless commitment. Frozen River is one little piece of misery.
