Frozen River
When American filmmaker Courtney Hunt heard of women transporting illegal immigrants from Canada to America across the frozen St Lawrence River (which happens to be Mohawk territory), she felt compelled to find out more and tell their story. The result, Frozen River, is her first feature film, and while it is fictitious, the underlying themes are unflinchingly real.
From the first shot, a close-up of Rae panning from her toes, up to her face, draws the audience into her world in an almost claustrophobic fashion. We see a faint red glow and hear the paper sizzle as she drags deeply on the cigarette, tears streaming down her weathered face. A few meagre days before Christmas, her husband has absconded with, and probably gambled away, the down payment for their dream home: a so-called “double-wide” mobile home. This is upstate New York, where the struggle to survive has made the people as harsh as the climate, and where the American Dream more closely resembles a nightmare.
When attempting to track down her husband, she encounters a Mohawk woman, Lila, who regards her with suspicion and contempt. Sheer necessity unites the two women in purpose, though their hearts and minds couldn’t be further apart.
The moral complexities are numerous in this film. If women are nurturers, why are they participating in such an exploitative scheme? How ethical is it, to allow Indigenous gambling houses, where hapless poverty-stricken folk gamble away what little money they earn? What has become of the human race that has descended into trading with each other’s lives?
Frozen River is courageously unfettered by sentimentality, and is therefore a richly rewarding realistic tale, yielding much material to ponder.
For her role as the struggling survivor Rae Eddy, screen veteran Melissa Leo has been nominated for an Oscar, and would probably be the most worthy recipient of the award. However, as Frozen River suggests and previous Academy Awards have confirmed: life is riddled with inequities and injustices and choices that are frankly impossible to rationalise.