Frozen River

Frozen River
Courtney Hunt | US | 2008
97 min

Crime is always about money, but it becomes far more interesting when it turns into greed. Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, her remarkable debut film, quickly and very succinctly establishes the main characters need for money early on and everything thereafter simply falls into place. Melissa Leo’s Ray is a mother with two kids living just above the poverty line after her Mohawk husband abandons her one morning. With Christmas around the corner, she needs to come up with a way to pay for her new house and the gifts she plans on putting underneath the tree at home. Fate deals a strange hand and she finds herself bumping into a Mohawk woman who suggests a good and uncommon use for her car with “button release trunks”. It’s not immediately obvious what this usage might be, and discovering this and where it leads becomes one of the films many fascinating joys.

Soon Ray and her Mohawk partner-in-crime Lila, start border crossing between New York and Canada smuggling people. The easy money is a lure but there is danger that lurks underneath and it rears its head soon enough, most astonishingly, and in the film’s best segment, when the two meet a Pakistani couple during a late night chilly escapade. The film deals with many issues – racism, destitution, America’s consumerist culture and national security, but in very subtle ways. Its low budget, DV camera actually accentuates the lack of glamour and gives it the feel of an early Coen’s film without the stark irony of the bloody twists. Melissa Leo has the thankless task of being a mother, a criminal and a person we can care about in great deal and her mesmerizing, moody performance deserves all the accolades it has received because she pulls it off in great manner. The film’s script applies Murphy’s Law in ways we both expect and dread, for when a situation has the potential to go wrong, it most certainly will and here it does so in brilliant, simplistic yet effective ways. One of the year’s best and most humane thrillers.