New Directors/New Films, the festival that the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center co-present each year in New York (appropriately in the early spring), is often a fantastic opportunity to sample developing cinematic talent. For me, the highlights of this year’s festival fell neatly into pairs: two narrative features and two documentaries.
Paradoxically, Frozen River is a crowd-pleaser about a family trying desperately to hold its head above the water of poverty. It features a wonderful lead performance by Melissa Leo as Ray, the single mom of two sons in a desolate small town in upstate New York. Misty Upham is also excellent as Lila, a Native American woman whose risky habit of smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S. leads first to a nasty fight between these two scrappy survivors, and then to their becoming unlikely business partners of a sort, and eventually, friends.
This is writer/director Courtney Hunt’s first feature, and she has done a terrific job pacing the story so that its inherent suspense never falters. (Reed Morano’s photography, austerely beautiful, or beautifully austere, captures the locale incisively and enhances the emotion and the tension as well.) Wry, edgy humor is balanced with the warmth (and the ache) of Ray’s not-always-blissful relationships with her two sons. Lila, too, has a son, from whom she has been unwillingly separated, and this gives her smuggling a poignant motivation (at first she just seems like a reckless, opportunistic lawbreaker).
The ending of the film is a little too pat, and probably it spares our feelings too much; the story flirts with grim danger and horrific consequences but then finds ways to avoid them. Still, this soft landing may help the movie to become an indie hit. It was the grand prize winner at Sundance, and drew an enthusiastic crowd to the opening night of ND/NF.
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