Illegal Immigrants Coming In From The North, Too – ‘Frozen River’ Review…
Posted on October 31, 2008 - 7:20pm by michael
Frozen River has all the makings of a sleeper hit. It has an interesting location presented so clearly you can almost feel the snow leaking into the tips of your shoes, it has characters with unique and interesting personalities that are wonderfully performed and never unrealistic for a split second, and it has a story that is at once completely believable, perfectly paced, and has the feel of real life. That last is the most difficult thing to achieve in the movie, and Frozen River does it better than the vast majority of the other Oscar nominees in any category.
But why is it nominated for Best Original Screenplay? Granted, the story is good and well-presented and performed, but the screenwriting itself has a few mistakes that are so childish and careless that I would more expect to see them in a junior high school book report.
The movie starts with a close-up of a woman’s face, and it’s full of sadness and suffering and betrays a life full of long, hard years. Then the camera pulls back and reveals the movie’s setting and soon the characters. It presents a portrait of the typical lower-class American family. A teenage son and a –year-old son being raised by a mother working at the Yankee Dollar store with no father figure in the house. He’s on a business trip/has abandoned them, and he’s taken the money they needed to buy the double-wide. All we know about him is that he has a gambling problem and probably took off on a bus to Atlantic City.
Melissa Leo gives the best and most important performance in the film. She’s Ray Eddy, the “single” mother badly struggling to raise her two children essentially on her own, now that the father has recently disappeared with their savings. Her 15-year-old son is wise beyond his years. He wants to quit school and get a job, believing – probably correctly - that he can earn enough money to help solve their desperate financial problems. But Ray refuses, insisting that he stay in school. The extent of the family’s dire financial situation shows how significant it is that she never even considers allowing him to quit school to go to work.
Ray has a low-paying job but has worked hard at it for years, even keeping a part-time job when a promised full-time position is 18 months overdue. She deals with the unfair treatment from her boss, a man probably 20 years younger than her, even though a younger, prettier, and trashier co-worker is granted free rides despite bad performance and chronic lateness.
The movie takes place on the border between the U.S. and Canada, at an unknown border-crossing area near an Indian reservation that a few Mohawks have been using as a spot to bring illegals into the country. Ray one day sees her car being driven by someone she doesn’t know and pursues her, ultimately getting herself tangled up in a dangerous smuggling operation.
Ray is an honest woman. She’s honest and hard-working and law-abiding, the kind of person that most of us can relate to pretty easily. We’ve all had financial troubles at some point in our lives, and when Ray gets that first few hundred dollars for bringing in some illegal immigrants, it’s easier to feel her relief than it is to worry about anything that might result from illegal immigration. We are relieved almost as if the money were solving our own problems rather than someone in a movie. We don’t want her to be caught for breaking the law, we want her to bring in a few more car-loads and get that trailer home for her and her son and daughter. This is a sign of outstanding characterization.
Unfortunately, the script is also peppered with foolish mistakes. At one point, Ray sets down two bowls of microwave popcorn for her kids, and her son says indignantly, “I’m not eating this for dinner again.” Not a minute later, he and his younger brother are rushed out the door to catch the morning school bus. So do they eat dinner before school or do they go to school after dinner?
At another point Ray and Lila, her smuggling partner, are driving into town with a car full of incriminating evidence, and a state trooper pulls into the road behind them and turns on both his lights and his siren. The next scene shows Ray nervously asking Lila, “What if he pulls me over?”
What if? Does she not know what lights and a siren mean? How did this get into the final cut? There is also the smaller but probably more significant issue of the Chinese illegals who at first refuse to get into the car because a woman is driving it. It’s not a problem for the story, just a simple but clear example of ignorance about the cultures displayed as illegal immigrants in the movie. There is absolutely no problem about woman drivers here in China. There are female taxi drivers all over this place, and they are generally much better and safer drivers than men.
The best thing that the movie does, however, is that it never once tells us the story, it shows us the story, which is much more difficult and much more effective. The performances by Melissa Leo and Misty Upham as Ray and Lila are so effective that nothing ever needs to be said to illustrate their relationship. Within minutes of their first screen time together, we get the feeling that we’ve known them each for a long time and are watching to see how they react to each other.
Never once is the movie about anything but personal financial need. It is not about illegal immigration or even smuggling, it just uses those things to illuminate the real meaning, and the setting provides the perfect backdrop to the story, both of which are cold and hard and unforgiving, but equally well-presented. I’m reminded of other similarly cold but brilliant films, like
Fargo and
Affliction, which also told stories of harsh reality in a difficult environment. None of them are what I would call feel-good entertainment (although there is definitely some dark hilarity to be found in
Fargo), but for quality entertainment it’s not easy to do better.
The Bean Meter
[caption id="attachment_22500" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="4.5 Beans out of 5."]
[/caption]
Frozen River has all the makings of a sleeper hit. It has an interesting location presented so clearly you can almost feel the snow leaking into the tips of your shoes, it has characters with unique and interesting personalities that are wonderfully performed and never unrealistic for a split second, and it has a story that is at once completely believable, perfectly paced, and has the feel of real life. That last is the most difficult thing to achieve in the movie, and Frozen River does it better than the vast majority of the other Oscar nominees in any category.
But why is it nominated for Best Original Screenplay? Granted, the story is good and well-presented and performed, but the screenwriting itself has a few mistakes that are so childish and careless that I would more expect to see them in a junior high school book report.
The movie starts with a close-up of a woman’s face, and it’s full of sadness and suffering and betrays a life full of long, hard years. Then the camera pulls back and reveals the movie’s setting and soon the characters. It presents a portrait of the typical lower-class American family. A teenage son and a –year-old son being raised by a mother working at the Yankee Dollar store with no father figure in the house. He’s on a business trip/has abandoned them, and he’s taken the money they needed to buy the double-wide. All we know about him is that he has a gambling problem and probably took off on a bus to Atlantic City.
Melissa Leo gives the best and most important performance in the film. She’s Ray Eddy, the “single” mother badly struggling to raise her two children essentially on her own, now that the father has recently disappeared with their savings. Her 15-year-old son is wise beyond his years. He wants to quit school and get a job, believing – probably correctly - that he can earn enough money to help solve their desperate financial problems. But Ray refuses, insisting that he stay in school. The extent of the family’s dire financial situation shows how significant it is that she never even considers allowing him to quit school to go to work.
Ray has a low-paying job but has worked hard at it for years, even keeping a part-time job when a promised full-time position is 18 months overdue. She deals with the unfair treatment from her boss, a man probably 20 years younger than her, even though a younger, prettier, and trashier co-worker is granted free rides despite bad performance and chronic lateness.
The movie takes place on the border between the U.S. and Canada, at an unknown border-crossing area near an Indian reservation that a few Mohawks have been using as a spot to bring illegals into the country. Ray one day sees her car being driven by someone she doesn’t know and pursues her, ultimately getting herself tangled up in a dangerous smuggling operation.
Ray is an honest woman. She’s honest and hard-working and law-abiding, the kind of person that most of us can relate to pretty easily. We’ve all had financial troubles at some point in our lives, and when Ray gets that first few hundred dollars for bringing in some illegal immigrants, it’s easier to feel her relief than it is to worry about anything that might result from illegal immigration. We are relieved almost as if the money were solving our own problems rather than someone in a movie. We don’t want her to be caught for breaking the law, we want her to bring in a few more car-loads and get that trailer home for her and her son and daughter. This is a sign of outstanding characterization.
Unfortunately, the script is also peppered with foolish mistakes. At one point, Ray sets down two bowls of microwave popcorn for her kids, and her son says indignantly, “I’m not eating this for dinner again.” Not a minute later, he and his younger brother are rushed out the door to catch the morning school bus. So do they eat dinner before school or do they go to school after dinner?
At another point Ray and Lila, her smuggling partner, are driving into town with a car full of incriminating evidence, and a state trooper pulls into the road behind them and turns on both his lights and his siren. The next scene shows Ray nervously asking Lila, “What if he pulls me over?”
What if? Does she not know what lights and a siren mean? How did this get into the final cut? There is also the smaller but probably more significant issue of the Chinese illegals who at first refuse to get into the car because a woman is driving it. It’s not a problem for the story, just a simple but clear example of ignorance about the cultures displayed as illegal immigrants in the movie. There is absolutely no problem about woman drivers here in China. There are female taxi drivers all over this place, and they are generally much better and safer drivers than men.
The best thing that the movie does, however, is that it never once tells us the story, it shows us the story, which is much more difficult and much more effective. The performances by Melissa Leo and Misty Upham as Ray and Lila are so effective that nothing ever needs to be said to illustrate their relationship. Within minutes of their first screen time together, we get the feeling that we’ve known them each for a long time and are watching to see how they react to each other.
Never once is the movie about anything but personal financial need. It is not about illegal immigration or even smuggling, it just uses those things to illuminate the real meaning, and the setting provides the perfect backdrop to the story, both of which are cold and hard and unforgiving, but equally well-presented. I’m reminded of other similarly cold but brilliant films, like Fargo and Affliction, which also told stories of harsh reality in a difficult environment. None of them are what I would call feel-good entertainment (although there is definitely some dark hilarity to be found in Fargo), but for quality entertainment it’s not easy to do better.
The Bean Meter
[caption id="attachment_22500" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="4.5 Beans out of 5."]
[/caption] 
