Stereotypical indie from the sucks-to-be-poor subgenre. Hope I'm not being too glib. It does suck to be poor. I'm nowhere near wealthy myself, and I grew up with a mother under similar circumstances to the protagonist of this film (a little smarter, though; at least she realized that she was eligible for food stamps). I have more than just sympathy for her and people like her. But I am still suspicious of movies like this that lay it on so thick and seem to delight in jerking the audience's emotions around. The story follows a middle-aged woman (Melissa Leo) trying desperately to get by on her meager, part-time wages. Her husband is a thief and gambler, and has stolen the little money she has saved up to buy herself and her two sons a bigger trailer. Up the creek without a paddle, Leo meets up with a Mohawk woman from the nearby reservation (Misty Upham) who introduces her to the lucrative world of smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border. First-time director and screenwriter Courtney Hunt seems to be following some kind of indie film-making book, because she makes sure to hit all the cliché bits. Everything is very predictable; everything that happens in the movie happens for a reason. For instance, every time a radio is on, the weather is reported, which will come back later in the story. The dots are all connected, and there's no room for character or mood building. The tone is pitched at that quiet, supposedly subtle level that so many indies are. The sequence that summarizes the movie is the one where Leo throws a duffel bag out the window of her car on the titular frozen river on a night that the radio, of course, tells us is going to be far below zero, because she's afraid that the Pakistani couple in her trunk might be terrorists. It turns out that their baby was in the bag. Horrible, right? Well, Leo's reaction is, "Well, we'll just have to go back and get it." She's so nonchalant about it, I was sure I must have mistakenly heard "baby". It turns out to be dead. Later, after one of the dozen or so contrivances that drive the film, the baby comes back to life in an apparent miracle. No reaction, at least from Leo. The event ends up changing Upham's outlook on life, but there's no grandiose reaction from her, either. The point is, anyway, that Hunt uses these silly, melodramatic situations which are completely unsubtle, and then she insists with her film-making that her movie is, in fact, subtle. I do have to admit that both Leo and Upham are decent actresses in the movie. I don't think either are award-worthy. It doesn't help that Leo's character often seems so profoundly stupid that it would be easy enough for a privileged audience to dismiss her with, "Well, someone like her deserves to be poor!" I like the attempt Hunt makes in exploring the subtle (and occasionally overt) racism of the white people in the film, but sometimes it feels like she wrote the script without any of it, and someone who read it suggested she add it to give it some more depth. Honestly, if she made it her focus and not just the sideline to the sucks-to-be-poor material, Frozen River would have been a more vital movie. As it is, it's rather poor, and definitely forgettable.
Review of Frozen River
