FROZEN RIVER sss Written and directed by Courtney Hunt With Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Michael O’Keefe, and Mark Boone Jr.
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People like Ray don’t find their way into commercial movies very often. When the working poor do turn up on-screen, they’re usually suffering saints, hardened criminals, or tasteless clods. Treating them as individuals would involve taking account of their daily lives, and no one, rich or poor, goes to the movies to think about that. When a filmmaker takes a stab at it, she can count on getting smacked around from more than one direction. Jeffrey Lyons, reviewing Frozen River on Lyons & Bailes Reel Talk, couldn’t stop moaning about how “depressing” it was, while Armond White in the New York Press dismisses Hunt as a “self-righteous middle-class” filmmaker and the movie as “a bleeding-heart fantasy of how the poor scrape by.”
Most of the movie’s press has focused on Leo, a talented character actor who’s been waiting two decades for a role like this. Fans of the standard-bearing cop show Homicide: Life on the Street will remember her as the tomboyish detective whose workaholism and guarded behavior toward men eventually flummoxed the show’s male writers; after five seasons she was replaced by a series of babes. As Benicio Del Toro’s anguished wife in 21 Grams and Tommy Lee Jones’s mistress in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Leo seemed to thrive in working-class settings, and she gives a fearless performance in Frozen River. Hunt introduces Ray with a long, merciless pan from the rose tattoo on her big toe to the cigarette dangling from her haggard face. Clad in a cheap bathrobe and windbreaker, she sits in the driver’s seat, the glove compartment hanging open; her husband, a gambling addict, has disappeared with the money they’ve been saving for a new double-wide.
If you’re not in the mood for all this misery you may not want to go near Frozen River, but be advised that it’s also a tough little thriller that drew effusive praise from Quentin Tarantino when he awarded it the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. That honor has been the commercial kiss of death for the past few years—Primer (2004), Forty Shades of Blue (2005), Quinceanera (2006), and Sangre de Mi Sangre (2007) all claimed it, opened small, and stayed that way. But Frozen River may have enough pure suspense to break that jinx, which is strange when you consider how little money is actually at stake in the movie: Hunt really manages to inflate the value of a dollar, making you feel every nickel and dime. Ray’s predicament may come to seem even more alarming as more of us see cracks in the ice.v
