Frozen River	by George Sax

Far From the Jordan's Banks

The waterway in the title of Courtney Hunt’s film is the Saint Lawrence, which does predictable double duty as a crucial topographical feature of Frozen River’s frigid northern New York setting and as a metaphor for the treacherously thin economic basis for life at the bottom of this country’s social hierarchy.

The symbolism is of negligible importance, but this film is admirably unusual in its focus on the kind of people who rarely get noticed by America’s films. (Or in its politics. The working poor are largely ignored by the Obamarama campaign rhetoric touting the Democratic candidate’s devotion to uplifting the neglected middle class.) Hunt has sought to achieve a clear-eyed look at the precarious lives of her characters, while conceding something to standard, old-fashioned commercial expectations. She succeeds much of the time, but not without wringing some audience-friendly narrative tension and emotional catharsis out of her material. But, as the Village Voice’s Ella Taylor has observed, without these, and a certain tendency to TV-movie-style domestic conventions, it’s unlikely that Sony Pictures Classics would have distributed it, or that Quentin Tarentino would have presented the film with this year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. (Taylor’s smart remark is that Frozen River serves “as a sop to the rich people who go to Sundance for their annual weep over poor people.”)

Hunt may have smoothed some of her film’s edges, and colored things some, but there’s still an uncommonly truthful vision at work in Frozen River.

At its center is Ray (Melissa Leo), a married mother of two sons living in a cramped, old, decrepit trailer outside of Massena. (The film was actually shot in Plattsburgh.) It’s the week before Christmas and her inadequately reformed drug- and gambling-addicted husband has just run off with the cash Ray’s been saving from a part-time job at a convenience store for the purchase of a new trailer home. Tracking him to a Mohawk reservation bingo parlor, she finds the car he’s abandoned, and encounters Lila (Misty Upham), a young Indian woman who coerces Ray into driving two illegal Chinese immigrants into Canada.

As her family’s situation deteriorates further, Ray desperately seizes on a dangerous opportunity and partners with Lila in the people-smuggling enterprise. Meanwhile, T.J., her precociously perceptive 15-year-old (the preciously accomplished Charlie McDermott), left in charge of his much younger brother, is drifting into his own illicit activities in order to fill their financial needs.

Writing and directing her first theatrical feature, Hunt has created a sure, effective pacing and a persuasively observed social milieu. The details are often unemphatically but tellingly present, including the barely muted resentment and mistrust of the white-Indian relations.

Leo, who was in TV’s Homicide: Life on the Streets, braces the film with a performance that has both impact and control. In a bigger, better financed production, this would be a much more celebrated star turn. Leo is emotionally convincing even when Hunt indulges in melodramatic contrivance, as she does most patently in the picture’s resolution.

Frozen River grew out of a short and it was shot in about two weeks with an advanced video camera. Sometimes, the challenges this kind of filmmaking poses are discernible, but Hunt’s accomplishment is real. Despite the aesthetically and economically cut corners, her film is an impressive debut.