Frigid River an Emotional Snowstorm

Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is having her worst Christmas ever. Her husband has disappeared with the down payment money the family needed for their new doublewide trailer, son T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and little brother Ricky (James Reilly) forced to watch their new home drive away maybe never to return.

Melissa Leo braces for the cold of life in Sony Pictures Classics' Frozen River

Faced with only a week to come up with the cash or lose the new home for good, a chance meeting leads Ray to an unlikely partnership with a down on her luck Mohawk named Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) living on the reservation. Using her husbands beaten up Dodge Spirit, the pair begin smuggling Chinese immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River using the vehicle’s trunk.

At first, all goes great. Ray is making money and Lila is getting closer to getting her own infant son back out of the hands of the mother-in-law who stole her away after her husband’s tragic death. But like all bad decisions masquerading as good ones, this euphoria isn’t going to last long. With the wind howling, the snow falling and the law – both tribal and federal – closing in, the two women have to make fateful decisions that will change their lives, and those of their families, forever.

Beautifully shot, helmed with stark bareness by freshman writer/director Courtney Hunt, Frozen River is a hard-edged emotional roller coaster that’s absolutely magnetic right from the first frame. This is a movie as cold and frigid as its title, the barren landscape having nothing on the ascetically brutal emptiness working overtime to devastate the lives of everyone it touches.

But it is the women, most notably 21 Grams and “Homicide: Life on the Street” actress Leo, who make the film a stunner. They are the heart and soul of the picture, the thundering beating hooves taking it from the haggardly wrinkled start to its intensely confused wide-eyed conclusion. These are women who should both be beyond repair. Yet each refuses to give up or give in, and what starts as mutual loathing and suspicion gently transforms into friendship and self-sacrifice as each woman learns neither is as different from the other as she first believed.

Which is all to the well and good because, for all of Hunt’s strengths behind the camera (and based on what is on display here she’s got tons of them) her script could easily have used another edit. The subplots involving a suspicious lawman (sneeringly played by Michael O'Keefe) and a brutal French-Canadian flesh peddler (a creepily menacing Mark Boone Junior) don’t really evolve enough to be effective, while scenes of Ray’s kids trying to keep positive in the face of their own poverty sometimes feel like they belong in completely different movie.

The thing is, even with those problems this is a riveting motion picture virtually impossible to resist. Discriminating viewers with intelligent tastes looking for something both thought-provoking and different will find plenty to feast upon here. This is a movie that sticks to your gut, its emotional corridors as dark and as twisted as that old dying oak tree in your grandparent’s backyard just begging to be climbed.

As for Leo, the woman is easily one of the most underrated (and underappreciated) actresses working today. A supporting actress all her life, Hunt gives her the chance to headline and to say she makes the most of it is a decided understatement. She is the picture’s lifeblood, its pounding heart begging to be heard. Without a doubt, next to Richard Jenkins in The Visitor and the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight this is easily one of the year’s most resonating and magnificent performances, and if Oscar had any sense it would just give the woman a phone call and nominate her right this very second. 

While the landscapes Frozen River bravely travels won’t be for everyone, I hope this tiny independent manages to hang on here at the latter edge of the Summer and play on long into the Fall. This is a movie deserving of recognition and support, its female-driven drama as dynamic, complicated and profound as any I’m likely to see this year.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  2008 SIFF Blog by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  2008 Seattle International Film Festival Home Page
-  Frozen River Theatrical Trailer