So back in the early summer of 2010, I
posted about an Upstate NY film fest I'd have liked to host, but since I'd just moved and nobody else seemed interested-- and one of the only reasons I personally spend time watching movies, anime, or TV is in order to share and discuss the movie's ideas and art with other people who I think might enjoy, hate, or be disturbed and intrigued by them, to share insights and debate and conversation with friends--I let the idea drop.
But I'm here now, in upstate NY, and it's cold, and library movie rental is cheap. Still no friends to discuss movies with in person, unfortunately, but maybe people have watched or will watch these movies on their own and want to discuss them.
So, a review of
Frozen River, from 2008. This movie opens with a shot of snow, and trees, and more snow, and some decrepit buildings and the sky a steely shade of grey. I thought, "it's like looking out my window." A sense of place is really strong in this movie, and what the place--
Massina, NY, a real town--says almost more than the people in it is "hope passed through here on the way to a better place." Ray, a woman whose life has treated her hard, works in the dollar store and lives in a trailer park like the one my school bus used to pass through; Lila, a Mohawk whose legal job options in the movie appear to be stuck somewhere between "answering phones in the Tribal offices" or "stamping people's bingo cards" lives in a trailer without heat, and needs more money in order to get her child back from her mother-in-law, who took him after Lila's husband died.
The two women are desperate--for Ray, a promised promotion to full-time employment hasn't come for two years, and her husband has run off with the down-payment for their new trailer, which she was going to get just in time for Christmas. For Lila she's been living with the personal and political--both inter-Tribal and extra-Tribal--implications of her husband's death during that smuggling run ever since; people suspect her of running the border or make it clear they resent her for her husband's death every time she leaves her trailer. She spends a lot of time in there.
In a very real way, this movie is about absence--absence of industry, absence of men (we never see Ray's husband or any memento of Lila's husband in the film, but the absence of both men is a presence throughout, and the grown men in the rest of the movie are all incidental), absence of money.
The two women meet--Lila co-opted Ray's second car, the one Ray's husband drove off in, and Ray follows Lila home, unsure if she's doing it for news of her husband but sure about needing the car back--and abrade; they're both too stubborn and too strong and too hurt. They don't converse for the first few meetings so much as aggress at each other in sentences. Lila knows where Ray can make money, but has no car. Ray has a car.
They start running immigrants across the border. They lose their families, a little--Lila passes up a job someone finds for her, and Ray lies to her eldest son about what she's doing. They start to become friends, even as they're not sure how to do that. It seems neither of them has had a friend for a very long time.
There's a subplot where Ray's eldest son, left alone with popcorn to eat and a kid brother who wants nothing except an unattainable $15 Hot Wheels track for Christmas, wondering where his dad is and when his mom is going to get home (and starting to be suspicious about her lies about the dollar store promotion), scams elderly Tribal members for their credit cards in a mix of altruism for his brother, resentment toward his parents' absence, and racism toward Mohawks (his mother described her first meeting with Lila to him in less-than-glowing terms, and hasn't been home much since, so he has no idea why his mother seems to slowly make a path from resentment to a sort of mute understanding, and his complex mix of emotions reflects very real and unfortunate regional political infighting between upstate NY tribal peoples and politicians whose main constituents are all broke and resentful white people. Charlie McDermott plays the boy. I think he's the finest actor in this movie; you can watch McDermott's character knowing he's crossed a moral line and then justifying it to himself with the desperate
need for self-justification of someone who's doing something seriously wrong for the first time, and paper over all of that with the factor that it's fun for him to impersonating somebody else's voice and life over the phone and get away with it, and show the fact that he's still naive enough as a teenager to show that he's having fun transgressing with the impersonation, a pleasure an adult might not allow themselves to acknowledge or take from the moral transgression. There's a scene with a blowtorch and Ray--the second one--which I think is beautiful. I love how the actor wears the clothing his character has--it's ten years out of date of cool, and he knows it, but ten years out of date is only five years out of date where he lives, and he pretends it's cool anyway and almost succeeds in making it so via conviction.
So much of this movie takes place inside the interior of a car that it becomes a stand-in for the personal interiors that are this movie's true driving force; you can feel the cold leaching through the windows and battling the heating system in the car and it becomes metaphor. When Ray gets out and runs, when the ice sags way--everything in this movie is too tired to crack--under that first wheel, it's almost like freedom.
This is not, despite everything, an ultimately depressing film, rather the reverse. Recommended.
Edit: I've just reserved the next 2 films I wanted to watch in this series,
Canadian Bacon and
October Country, on hold at the library, so if people want to pick them up and then watch and chat, you can.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
