the where of it

Courtney Hunt’s “FROZEN RIVER” a triumph

• Posted by Summer Wood on June 2nd, 2009 filed in movies, places
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Living as I do in the wilds of Taos County, I catch most of my movies long after they’ve left the box office.  FROZEN RIVER is no exception.  Debuting at Sundance Film Festival in January ’08 and entering theaters across the country in a limited release six months after that, I’m nearly a year – and a couple of Oscar nominations – behind.

No matter.  FROZEN RIVER stands up to time.  It is a splendid film, with rock-solid acting and an unsentimental story line, and I found it both edge-of-my-seat compelling to watch and deeply moving to reflect on.  How many films that pivot on a piece of ice can claim that combination?

It’s no ordinary piece of ice, though.  The frozen river of the title is the stretch of St. Lawrence that bisects the Mohawk reservation.  Treacherous and unpredictable, the river forms the border between the U.S. and Canada.  “No border,” insists Lila (Misty Upham), a young Mohawk woman who forms an uneasy alliance with Ray (Melissa Leo), a white woman down to her last dime.  “It’s all Mohawk land.”

Ray is sinking, trying to raise her two kids on a part-time salary cashiering at a dollar store, and the distinction is lost on her – until its ramifications come clear.  Border Patrol lacks jurisdiction on the reservation.  The river, frozen enough to drive over in the winter months, is a conduit for undocumented immigrants willing to pay to be smuggled into the States.  Lila has the connections and Ray has the car, and both women – single mothers teetering on the razor edge of poverty – are in desperate need of the cash that’s passed through the car window in crumpled paper bags.

The landscape is austere and unforgiving; both the tin-can trailers the women inhabit and the snow-covered roadsides they travel leave little room to negotiate.  These are women who know how to tow a car, fire a pistol, start a recalcitrant engine.  Necessity has taught them those skills – just as it has taught them never to trust another human.   Not your boss.  Not your husband.  And definitely not the woman of a different race who is quick to take advantage of the slightest weakness on your part. 

FROZEN RIVER is about trust, though.  This film about a physical border is also, deeply, about the borders between people – and, just as the melting river ice introduces a new element of danger to the treks Lila and Ray make back and forth across it, so does the thaw between them put them each at risk.

This is an honest and unflinching movie, but it is not brutal.  There are no villains.  There is only a profound empathy for the choices we make when we’re pushed to the wall.