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.

I saw a great movie the other night.  It’s called WENDY AND LUCY, and I can’t get it out of my head.  I wish I could.  Wendy, the girl, and Lucy, her dog, are en route to Alaska from Indiana, and encounter some difficulties when they stop to sleep in their car in a Walgreen’s parking lot in Oregon.  We hang with them for the few days they’re in town, and then, eighty minutes after the movie starts, Wendy and Lucy are family.  My family.  For life.

I am very, very ambivalent about this.

So what does this have to do with place?  Well, first, because when it comes to portraying place, film should have a boost over other art forms by its very nature.  Am I right?  I mean, what other medium can visually represent an actual place and allow a story to unfold there over time?  The camera eye narrates, unmediated by language, and the result is a visual immediacy that can create the illusion of being smack in the middle of a place.

But, in my experience, this rarely happens.  In most movies, place is window dressing.

In Kelly Reichardt’s films, place is critical.  Both this film and the one that preceded it, OLD JOY, are set in Oregon.  OLD JOY takes place mostly in the deep green of an old forest; WENDY AND LUCY in an Oregon lumber town, down on its heels now that the mill has closed down.  But don’t confuse these with nature films.  They are neither didactic nor celebratory.  They are – clear-eyed, I’d have to say.  Deeply unsentimental.  Deeply odd.  Deeply compassionate.

Devastatingly beautiful.

I won’t argue that what happens in these films (and, I’ll be honest, very little does) couldn’t happen anywhere else.  What I suggest is that the director makes you feel that it is happening here, and now, and every element and every detail pertains to that.  There’s an odd combination of inevitability and wide-open freedom in Reichardt’s writing and directing that makes both movies feel unscripted, unforced, and absolutely real.  The cinematography is gorgeous, deliberate, and rarely heavy-handed, creating a lexicon of images that accrue meaning throughout each film.  The camera lingers equally on visage and backdrop, until the separation between the two seems to fall away.

The pace of these movies will offend plenty of people.  The characters aren’t conventionally appealing (although God knows and the rest of the world is coming to find out that Michelle Williams, as Wendy, is absolutely incandescent).  The limited dialogue and use of natural light may deter some viewers.

When people say something is “good for your soul”, they usually mean it’s uplifting; causes you to take heart.  These movies aren’t that.

Go see them anyway.  They’re good for your soul in a way that’s even better, maybe.