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Film Frozen River (2008)
HHH
Director: Courtney Hunt Cast: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott Writer: Courtney Hunt
reservation that spans from New York into Canada. Lila introduces Ray to the lucrative business of trafficking illegal immigrants, hiding them in the trunk of her car as she drives from Canada to the US over the frozen river. The police can't touch them because the river and both of its banks exist on Mohawk territory; the police, however, are the least of their problems. Ray singlehandedly supports two boys, one a young child and the other a pyromaniacal teen; meanwhile, her husband has hopped a bus to — she can only assume — Atlantic City. Lila, on the other hand, lost custody of her son when her husband was killed on a trafficking run. These women's struggles run parallel, intersecting only narrowly in the end. Neither uses nor exploits the other, rather the need to get by despite extraneous circumstances drives the two women into a mutual agreement that what they're doing is for the better. As a result, Hunt has created two of the most compelling female leads in recent cinema, indie or otherwise. Frozen River at once makes the possibilities of the human condition both bleak and compelling, a testament to Hunt's ability to articulate the struggle of motherhood in the face of societal oppression without a result that is overtly melodramatic or contrived. — Nick Cabreza
Virtually every event in writer/director Courtney Hunt's Frozen River originates in the characters acting out of severe desperation. Comparable to the quandaries of Charlize Theron in Monster and Tilda Swinton in The Deep End, the plight of Melissa Leo's female protagonist Ray Eddy occurs out of the need to survive in an environment with few opportunities to lead a decent life. Here the environment is New York State along the Canadian border, buried under snow and ice in the days leading up to Christmas. The overwhelming bleakness coating the lives of the characters in Frozen River finds a workable conceit in the title's namesake, a solid body of water over which it's not uncommon for cars, or even 18-wheelers, to pass. Even in her first feature, Hunt proves she's capable of allowing setting and character to coexist and develop naturally, the key to which is allowing the film to remain quiet and simple, not unlike the struggles people encounter every day in real life. Leo's performance is supplemented, and in many ways equally matched, by that of Misty Upham's Lila, a woman living on the Mohawk
Bibliophile Matt Ruff – Bad Monkeys (2007) 302 Pearl St.
Second Supper vol. 8, issue 133
782-7890
Oh, come on. Like you wouldn’t see a book with monkeys on the cover and snatch it up. Though it’s disappointing to find out that the monkeys in question are of the sinister human design — with nary a glop of flung feces in the tale — Bad Monkeys is a kickass work of scifi noir with the brain twisting curves of Fight Club. God and the devil aren’t explicitly mentioned in the story, but the biblical, black-andwhite sense of good vs. evil runs an ironic path through the narrative. Parallel to this is an examination of technology and its use to monitor and control an unaware public. In Bad Monkeys, Big Brother is working both sides of the fence. The Organization (good guys) and the Troop (bad guys) have both covered the world with invisible cameras and other devices, creating a surveillance so complete that not only do they know what one is reading, but what parts of those books one pores over. Of course, critical points in the story have the bad guys jamming those devices and causing tension, while the heroes save their sinister tech for the end. Matt Ruff emphasizes the struggle between good and evil at the expense of the control versus freedom question, but remains aware of technology’s danger throughout. In an interview that comes with the book, he states
that what makes the Organization so effective is not the technology it uses but the incorruptible people behind it. Furthermore, Ruff sees the technology question as what one does with the gathered information, not the data itself. As the layers of protagonist Jane Charlotte’s life get peeled away and revisited, the technology becomes the main character, it aims unclear. Consequently, the events are less important. Jane Charlotte, by all accounts, is a charismatic, but unpleasant person to know. But the surveillance tapes always convey that first, before she is forced to confront her unearthed sins. Either the Eye in the Sky is heroic, or it’s a witch hunter – and in Charlotte’s case, it’s likely both – but the underlying fact is that in this world, nobody is truly free. An introductory quote from H.L. Mencken states it well: “Conscience: the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.” Similarly, the story’s ending is too deus ex machina, though in some ways it makes sense. While the wrap-up is meant to display “the futility of evil,” the true message conveyed is that evil is only futile if good has obtained the proper upgrades. Nonetheless, this is a fun and surreal trip, and as my inner dialogue has hopefully shown, a thought-provoking one as well. — Brett Emerson
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