FROZEN RIVER (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Courtney Hunt
Melissa Leo, Misty Upham,
Charlie McDermott, Michael O'Keefe
Melissa Leo plays Ray Eddy, a middle-aged woman who looks a lot older, living with her two sons in a rundown trailer in a depressed corner of upstate New York. Her husband, a gambling addict, has run off to who knows where, taking all their money. It's not that she's barely making it on her part-time job at the local store. She's not making it. There's not enough for Christmas, not enough for food, not enough to keep the TV from being repossessed, and certainly not enough to make the down payment on that shiny new double-wide she's set her dreams on. So she grudgingly teams up with a sullen young Mohawk woman, whose circumstances aren't any better, on a smuggling run across the frozen St. Lawrence, sneaking illegals over the border from Canada. It's a wrenching, unblinking and emphatically unsentimental look at what life's like at the bottom of the economy - the world of the desperate, tenacious and too often invisible working poor. Leo, whose performance got her an Oscar nomination, gets to the soul of a woman who hasn't known a happy day in her life. It's a downer, for sure, yet it ends with a glimmer of hope, or maybe just a suggestion that where hope is mostly an illusion, a simple, fleeting moment of joy is enough to be worth hanging on for, and quite possibly the best that can be expected.
Misty Upham
(1982-2014)
