If things feel economically awful right now, well, hey, money’s been tight for most of us for years now, right? Decades, even. (My highest-earning years were in the 1990s, when I was in my 20s. That’s not how things are supposed to be.) Writer-director Courtney Hunt’s gripping, shattering, enraging Frozen River was released in 2008, before the financial crash that autumn, and it’s easy to imagine that the two desperate women in the center of its story are barely any better off today, like so many of the rest of us.
Anyway: entertainment! The extraordinary pair of Melissa Leo — Oscar-nominated for this performance* — and Misty Upham are uneasy partners in a moneymaking scheme to ferry illegal immigrants by car across the deep-frozen St. Lawrence River, which is the US–Canadian border in northern New York State. Fascinating is how Hunt’s story straddles moralities, gender motivations, and ideas of poverty and despair in such a way that you’re not sure, by the end, what’s “right” and what isn’t.
(*Hunt was also Oscar-nominated for her screenplay, and the film garnered a slew of noms and a couple of wins in that year’s awards from the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, of which I am a voting member.) (Read my 2008 review.)
US: stream on Hulu; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on BFI Player (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Frozen River at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
