You Can't Take That Gun Across The Cornwall Bridge

Frozen River
2008, dir. Courtney Hunt. 1 hour 37 minutes
stars Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott

I read somewhere once that between 75 and 80% of Canadians live within 100 km of the United States border. Here in Ottawa, just across the nearest border at the Cornwall bridge are towns like Ogdensburg, Malone, and the setting of the film Frozen River, Massena. Every now and then my parents or grandparents would take us cross border shopping, and we'd drive through this empty, destitute landscape of up upstate New York and they'd talk about how poor it was, as poor as the Deep South, but no one in the media ever seemed to talk about it.

That poverty and destituteness is on display here in Frozen River, the Sundance Film Festival winning and Academy Award nominated debut film from Courtney Hunt. Melissa Leo plays Ray, and mother of two and wife of an unseen gambling addict, who, just before the film opens has taken off with the down payment for their new mobile home, their double wide with wall-to-wall carpeting and a jacuzzi tub in the bathroom. Ray is only pulling part-time hours at a local dollar store (one I'm 105% sure my grandmother has been in), and is hoping for a managerial promotion that is clearly never coming, and while searching for her husband, encounters a young Mohawk woman, Lila, and eventually the two end up in a small people smuggling operation. They make a few thousand dollars, almost enough to accomplish their respective goals, and they decide to make one last run ... and we all know how that works.

Frozen River works very well on two levels. It is at once a drama about a single-in-all-but-name mother trying to get her kids into a nicer house that's insulated properly so the pipes won't freeze, and also as a taught suspense thriller during the smuggling sequences. I would defy any of you to drive a car across a frozen outlet of the St. Lawrence River without a giant lump in your throat. It also offers a brief glimpse about how the laws and rules work a bit differently on a Mohawk (or probably any kind of native) reserve, and how those differences isolates natives and whites from each other. Melissa Leo gives a reserved yet intense performance, the kind of performance that doesn't always get notice. Luckily, Leo has earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her work here.

Frozen River is a great film, and if you live around Eastern Ontario, you'll probably recognize some of the locations.

4 stars

Seen at the Mayfair by myself on Monday night, where I sat in their very comfortable leather couches.