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Frozen River
Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
It’s legendary director Billy Wilder’s second rule of filmmaking. (The first is: The audience is fickle.)
Grabbing the audience by the throat? Not a problem for Hollywood blockbuster films. It’s their specialty. They give us cyborgs and spaceships, secret codes and Megan Fox’s ass. And most of the time, we love them for it.
But can an American independent film do the same thing? Can it do the same thing and still claim to be independent?
Frozen River, the first film from writer-director Courtney Hunt, cannot be confused for a Hollywood picture. The movie is truly independent: no-name cast, unconventional characters, shot entirely on location and with a low budget. A scene taking place in a strip club could only afford one stripper.
In its story, however, Frozen River is structured like a classic Hollywood film.
Ray Eddy is a woman in trouble. She’s married to a gambling junkie. She has two kids she can barely support. She works a low-wage job and lives in a broken-down trailer. And only moments into Frozen River, she hits another crisis. Her husband has left, taking all their savings with him.
Ray counts out change for her kids’ lunch money, gasses up her car with what’s left, and sets off to find her husband. She finds his Dodge Spirit in the parking lot of a bingo palace run by Mohawk Indians. But her husband’s not there. Turns out the car was stolen by Lila, a Mohawk woman who works at the place. (Ray’s husband left it behind at a bus station, with the keys still in it.) Ray chases Lila down to her home and demands the return of her car. Lila instead offers to sell it. She knows some local smugglers (she lives on a reservation at the US-Canada border) who would be interested.
They drive together to the place Lila knows, another trailer. A man exits and hands Lila an envelope of cash. Lila asks Ray to count the money — while the guy sneaks two people into her trunk. Then Lila steals Ray’s gun and points it.
RAY: I’m not going anywhere until those people get out of my trunk.
LILA: I’ll give you half. Now let’s go. Let’s go!
RAY: I’m not taking ‘em across the border. It’s a crime.
LILA: There’s no border here. This is free trade between nations.
RAY: This isn’t a nation.
LILA: Let’s go.
And they go.
That’s 18 minutes into the film.
Location is character. The film takes place in upstate New York, along the frozen St. Lawrence river of the title. There are many shots of the sky, snow, and ice that define the region. What’s interesting is how the location is used — not just as a setting for the story but also, through transition shots and within shots, to effect the overall mood and tone.
Character is character. In many ways, Ray has no choice but to do what she does: she’s answering for mistakes made earlier in life. But it’s a conscious choice, and she does it without flinching. She carries herself like an aging lion, striving to defend her cubs. Her gait and tone of voice, hard and solemn, reminded me of John Wayne. Ray’s oldest son T.J. (the strongest male character in the film) offers to help by getting a job. But Ray adamantly refuses. “You have to finish school,” she says. Instead, she partners up with Lila, on increasingly dangerous smuggling excursions across the ice, for the modest version of the American Dream: a double-wide trailer for her and her kids.
RAY: You should see the inside.
LILA: How many bedrooms?
RAY: Three. And there’s a jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom.
LILA: Wall-to-wall carpet?
RAY: Oh yeah. But the best thing is the insulation. Pipes never freeze.
“One more run.” In another filmmaker’s eyes, this main point of Frozen River could be taken as a punchline, and the plot could be taken as a gimmick. The social issue (in this case, immigration) could have taken center stage — as in issue-centered films like The Visitor and The Soloist. This could have been made into a Lifetime movie, or they could have inserted a love interest for Ray. But the film wisely sidesteps all of this, and as a result Frozen River has a lot to say about something more intimate: family and motherhood. It does what the best independent films do: expose us to stories and characters apart from the Hollywood realm. But this time, there’s a clear, intelligent design to it too — the kind usually reserved to mass audiences. As in the best Hollywood films, the magic takes over. Except this magic is the kind born out of struggle, and not purely for show.
Comments
I enjoyed Frozen River. Watching how far Ray was willing to go to give her children the modest stylings of a double-wide with pipes that don’t freeze was quite touching. I especially enjoyed the relationship that Lila and Ray develop over the course of smuggling runs. It almost felt like a buddy-cop film. They don’t know each other, they dislike each other, they share danger, they learn about each other, they find commonalities, they empathize with one another, they become partners.
From these shots, it looks like it’s an old film but I see it’s from ’08. And the location images you have remind me of Fargo. I find it funny that they could only afford one stripper while that indie film we saw the other week was shot in a strip club with multiple strippers and a lot lower budget. So why’d you decide to watch this film?
Sounds cool. I’ll have to track this one down