Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Frozen River

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they sit down over popcorn and Tang to discuss what they’ve just been through. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we'll be discussing the 2008 debut from writer/director Courtney Hunt, Frozen River, which earned Melissa Leo a Best Actress nomination. If you haven't seen it yet, you'll probably want to turn back now. The below discussion contains heavy spoilers!

Next week: Grilled - sitcom heavyweights Ray Romano and Kevin James play meat salesmen. Yes, we're serious.

Jeremiah: Frozen River is obviously a very appropriate title due to the frozen St. Lawrence’s prominent role in the plot. But perhaps just as important is the frigid temperatures that it and just about every shot in the movie brings to mind. Watching this movie didn’t make me cold, it made me thankful that I rarely need to deal with such low temperatures. The ever-present harsh conditions make it easy to sympathize with a woman who wants to buy a new house for her and her two sons almost entirely because of superior insulation. The increased space and the Jacuzzi bathtub are all secondary. She’s trying to provide shelter in its most basic, necessary sense.

Melissa Leo and Misty Upham are terrific as Ray and Lila. The way that they are able to convey such a strong desire to provide for their children along with a world-weary apathy towards everything else that life throws at them is very impressive. This interesting dichotomy leads to one of the more dramatic moments in the film, when they realize that they have left a baby in a duffel bag out on the frozen river. I wouldn’t call their reaction callous, but they certainly didn’t seem traumatized (at least not yet) by the idea that their actions may have caused the death of a child, even though they do all this in the interest of their own children. After retrieving the baby, Ray tells Lila to keep it close to her body even if it’s dead because they can’t give it back to the mother cold. Ray is realistic about the baby’s chances of survival but there’s also a clear sense of compassion. She knows that handing a cold, dead baby over to the mother would simply be unforgivable.

This movie creates an interesting contrast with the first film we watched, Julia (and the comparison isn’t entirely dissimilar from that between Flame & Citron and Black Book that we discussed last week). Both feature desperate women compelled to take illegal measures to earn quick cash. Frozen River is more plausible with more understandable and sympathetic characters, while Julia offers a more exciting, tense experience. The most telling difference might be that in Frozen River, the women are simply trying to scrape together enough money to get by, while Julia is looking for a big payoff so that she will never have to “work” again. Frozen River is about pragmatists, while Julia is about a dreamer (and a schemer).

Jeff: I expected to really enjoy Frozen River. For starters, I've liked Melissa Leo dating back to her work on Homicide: Life on the Street. Famously, I predicted her Best Actress nomination in advance of the Oscars last year. Yeah, that's right - and I hadn't even seen the movie. Suck it, haters. Anyway, she's a great, highly underutilized actress.

I was also expecting this to be a little more in the vein of Julia, and while the comparison that Jeremiah made is certainly apt, I was totally underwhelmed by Frozen River. It lacked the thrills of Julia, I didn't feel that Melissa Leo's Ray was nearly as compellingly drawn as Tilda Swinton's Julia and, despite being nearly an hour shorter than Julia, I was often bored. Yeah, it's pretty exciting when they leave that baby out on the ice, but that's conveniently resolved by the hand of the creator and we're never really forced to examine the morality of what Ray did (or her sudden fear of Arabs).

I won't argue that Ray and Lila aren't more sympathetic than Julia. Although, I do take some issue with Jeremiah labeling Misty Upham's performance as "terrific." I'm not buying that. To say Upham's performance was subdued would be too complimentary; I'd go more with sleepy. If you ask me, Leo's only competent co-worker was scenic upstate New York which did a great job appearing frozen, desolate, and impoverished. Oh, and the guy with the crazy hair from Batman Begins and Lonesome Jim was also pretty good.

Anyway, of course Ray and Lila are more sympathetic than Julia. They don’t strap any children to radiators or run anybody over. They're also infinitely less interesting. I didn't feel anything when the crazy French-Canadian shot at Ray. It was inevitable that she would survive, inevitable that she would sacrifice herself for her children, inevitable that our two hard-up women would come out of the experience scathed but a little better off. This is all rote indie hand-wringing. A weak script. And, unfortunately, Leo's performance alone isn't enough to carry it.

After watching Julia, the ladies in Frozen River just didn't seem desperate enough.

Bill: Frozen River looks and feels like every single movie that plays Sundance. It opens in a snowy field in the middle of nowhere, with a soft guitar flourish or two. The subject matter of smuggling Chinese illegal immigrants across the titularly frozen St. Lawrence by way of an Indian reservation has a built-in audience of about 17 people. All of this makes me roll my eyes because these low-budget "character studies" about "morality" and "redemption" tend to range from mediocre to terrible.

Something about Frozen River works, though. That something is most likely Melissa Leo. Ray reminds me of a few people I've known through the years. Watching her cold, hardened reactions to all these terrible things that keep happening, I find myself wondering about her backstory. Perhaps a prequel is in order. I give the writer much credit for using recording an outgoing voicemail message as a motif. Much like in Julia, I find myself rooting for Ray get away with all her illegal doings. I cheered a bit when she saved her ridiculously unnecessary flatscreen from getting repo'ed. Perhaps someday someone will make one of these morality stories and have the protagonist get away with it.

There are also plenty of moments in Frozen River that don't quite work for me. The scene where Lila sees a baby in a restaurant, and she's all "oh yeah, I have a son," is pretty cliche. Ray and TJ's blowtorch showdown is a little clunky. And not to be too terribly nitpicky, but why wouldn't Ray look in the bag before throwing it onto the ice? I also go back and forth on Misty Upham being terrific or sleepy.

For all its odd plot devices and annoying independent-ness, I'm glad Frozen River exists. It's incredibly refreshing to see a movie centered on characters like these. Unglamorous people actually make up the majority of the population. If a big studio had made Frozen River, it probably would've starred an uglied up Cameron Diaz, with Queen Latifah as Lila, Michael Cera as her small time con-man son and Peter Sarsgaard and Dax Shepard as smugglers (not that I've thought about this too much). Granted, that's certainly a movie I'd see, but I'm glad I can see this one instead.

Jason: The comparison between Frozen River and Julia is an interesting one. To compare Ray and Lila to Julia is perhaps not entirely fair though, as Julia was the title character with an extra hour to develop and explore. And this is not to say that I agree that Ray and Lila were uninteresting. I was really interested in Ray: why she had worked a dollar store for two years without a promotion, why her “go to move” was to pull a gun out on people, things like that. I specifically loved when her son called her out for being bitter and she immediately went to change her outgoing voicemail message (unsuccessfully, I might add).

I didn’t find Lila boring at all. In fact, I think her general demeanor only made the moments when she actually did express emotion all the better. Her quiet frustration about not being able to see clearly, working the receptionist job, having a bullet hole in her trailer door… I found these to be endearing.

As Jeff points out though, there are certainly weak parts of the script. The whole “getting busted on the last run” was lame, and then to propose that only one of the two had to be turned in was simply bullshit. Making Ray afraid of Arabs just to advance the plot was also a bogus choice in my mind.

Immorality abound (let’s not forget T.J. swindling the old Mohawk lady), Frozen River gives us a great look at what cold desperation feels like. The things some people will do for a double-wide… gosh!

Next week: Grilled

Tagged as: best actress, frozen river, julia, melissa leo, misty upham, tilda swinton