Written and directed by Courtney Hunt, Frozen River could — if perhaps reset in Spain and helmed by Pedro Almodovar — just as easily be titled Women on the Edge, for it’s a movie all about the struggle of blue-collar, dirty-fingernailed retail moms for whom life doesn’t quite work, and cigarettes are a luxurious escape. A slice of socioeconomically depressed cinema very loosely in the vein of George Washington or Come Early Morning, Hunt’s feature debut is anchored by Best Actress Oscar nominee Melissa Leo’s fiercely prideful, stirring performance, which recommends the title for fans of smart, quiet acting.
Life in Massena, New York, a small border town of 13,000 along on the northern edge of St. Lawrence County, is as harsh and barren as the frigid landscape. In this bleak terrain, two hardened single mothers trying to make a life for their children cross paths in unlikely fashion. Lila (Misty Upham) is a widowed Mohawk whose mother-in-law “stole” her newborn son a year ago. Ray (Leo) is the mother of two boys, 15-year-old T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and little Ricky (James Reilly), whose unreliable, come-and-go, gambling-addicted husband just disappeared with the $1,500 down payment for their new double-wide trailer home. Faced with little opportunity to make ends meet, Ray and Lila embark on an illegal venture transporting immigrants into the U.S. across an iced-over river on Native American reservation territory. With the money for the completion/delivery payment within Ray’s grasp, the women are determined to make one last run. When circumstances spiral out of control, the two women must make life or death decisions based on their love for their children and quasi-friendship.
Hunt fetishizes the worried, working woman’s creases of Leo’s face, and in this regard (smartly? by chance?) lets Leo do a lot of the film’s emotional heavy lifting. Much of the rest of Frozen River is all surface drama, though, which is problematic both because of Upham’s limited professional resumé and the fact that Hunt has trouble crafting dialogue that doesn’t come across like a hammer on a nail. (“I don’t usually work with whites,” says Lila at one point, then, “They won’t stop you — you’re white.” Later, a character literally searches for money in the couch cushions, something I don’t believe I’ve done since I was seven, no matter how desperate to pay the rent.) The inherent dramatic conflict here is all telegraphed, in other words. Some nonverbalized details work much better (Ray’s oldest son spreading burnt popcorn to mask the smell of an accident, for instance), and the movie is both nicely photographed and has an additional pinch of timeliness due to the foreclosure crisis sweeping the nation. But mostly Frozen River, a sort of pencil sketch character flick, runs out of natural mesmeric pull, and coasts on the strength of its steely star — a career supporting actress now reborn as a leading lady.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Frozen River comes presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 audio track and optional French subtitles. Somewhat dishearteningly, the sole supplemental bonus feature is an audio commentary track with Hunt and producer Heather Rae. The women speak glowingly of their collaborators, and talk some about the inspiration for the film (some non-fiction articles and research Hunt did), but the track is punctuated by long silences, and would have benefited from a moderator’s presence to help coax out not just more production anecdotes but a grander discussion of the movie’s thematic social content. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)
Meant to post this last week, but what does the future of film coverage in Los Angeles look like? Kind of depressing, but also laughably terrible, truth be told. Since they let film editor and chief critic Andy Klein go last month, CityBeat has, as I understand it, been picking up what little film stuff they’ve run from out-of-town sources (i.e., writers on other papers they own, in Seattle and elsewhere). This has led to some strange circumstances — including the reviewing of things that
have shuttered in L.A., and/or already been reviewed, as well as a complete lack of any updated film material online for several weeks. The new nadir? For the week of
February 6, CityBeat ran a single capsule review of the Weinstein Company’s Fanboys in its print edition. Then, for the week of February 13, they ran… the very same
review of Fanboys. Yikes. I don’t know if this is a case of printer error (very tough to believe, given updated layout), or some cheap, shrugging stop-gap trick that the powers-that-be thought they could slip by, but I can tell you from experience that that sort of thing is not only a white flag of surrender to any reader with half a brain, but will be noticed by movie studios and ad buyers as well.
It didn’t make the final cut for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar
nominations, but Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, the Grand Prix winner at
the Cannes Film Festival last year, drew favorable comparisons to
plenty of trailblazing American cinema for its Altman-esque juggling of
disparate, thematically intertwined storylines. A gritty ensemble drama about the tidal pull of
despair and entrapment that Italian organized crime wreaks, the movie
interweaves a half dozen sprawling, bird’s-eye story strands; its characters include a family
involved in shady waste management dealings, a haute couture tailor who
accepts under-the-table work from cut-rate Chinese competitors, and two
stray-dog teens (below) with unruly criminal impulses but no order to their
schemes. I spoke with Garrone before the final Oscar selections,
and he talked about Gomorrah‘s theatrical success in his homeland, the state of the
Italian government’s war on the mafia, and what Oliver Stone thought about his film. The interview is excerpted below.
Brent Simon: Was Roberto Saviano’s novel something you were familiar with prior to signing on to the movie?
Matteo Garrone: I started to work on this project before it became a bestseller. It had just been published two weeks prior when producer Domenico Procacci got the rights. So I talked to Roberto about the idea of making a movie, and at that time he was under [police] protection. But I never had any hesitation to make this movie, because I thought it was a very important book and also a great opportunity for me as a filmmaker.
BS: Was the actual production of the film dangerous?
MG: Yes, we changed the title of the movie when we were shooting, but we discovered that people love cinema so much that they were happy anyway to work on an artistic project. Fortunately, we found great collaboration from the people that live in that territory, where we shot. We found the help of the people valuable because we wanted to tell a story about the Camorra (or mafia) from the inside, from the bottom up, from the point-of-view of people involved in these conflicts every day, and just trying to survive. We didn’t want to make a movie just against Camorra, or to show how bad things are. It’s a movie about Camorra more than just against them.
BS: How long was the shoot?
MG: Three months, with three months of preparation. So I spent about six months living in that area, and for me it was very surprising to find out that in Italy in 2008 there was a territory in the middle of a war. But you also talk with people who are happy to live like that, and you can meet people who you feel are really not aware about their condition, because if you grow up there, you know no different.
BS: The film has six credited screenwriters, which is an awful lot. What was that collaboration like?
MG: We gathered and wrote in Rome, but there was rewriting. Even after editing, we wrote some more scenes and [went] back to shoot again. It was a long process. Every writer handled a specific part of the screenplay. Saviano came, but he started to have more and more problems with the Camorra, so he started to come more rarely, and with police protection. We worked for four months on the script, and the writers came to the set during shooting to give their advice. My way of working is that everyone helps one another — the editor helps the screenwriter, and the screenwriter helps the set designer, you know? We are all friends.
BS: You’ve said that you filmed Gomorrah in a very straightforward fashion to reproduce the feelings that you were having while shooting. Is that approach different than your other movies?
MG: In this case the material was so strong that it was very important not to make any comment on it, because there’s the risk of banalizing what you’re working on. It was important and advisable to be very simple. I come from painting, so I’m a very visual director — there is always composition of the frame. But sometimes I shoot like something was happening just in the moment, like reportage in a war. We wanted to give this idea to the audience — to [put them] there, on the inside.
BS: So had you shot any of your other films in this manner?
MG: Not in this way. There is always a relation with documentary, but in a different way. For me it’s always very important to go [on location], and talk with people, know the detail of every part of the reality that I’m talking about. Then I try to make an interpretation of that reality — not an imitation. Those are very different. I’m not interested in the latter.
BS: I’ve seen a number of documentaries on the Camorra, but I wasn’t aware of the toxic dumping, and how big an issue that is, how long it’s been going on. Is that matter well known and reported on in Italy?
MG: To be honest, I didn’t know about it, and that’s why we decided to develop those characters and that story, and also to talk about the environment. I went to the real territory and saw the place where they used to dump this toxic waste… it’s amazing. Cancer there is 20 percent higher, and it’s incredible because the first people who died are the ones that weren’t making enough money through agriculture, so they rented the area to make more money.
BS: Marco and Zero, the two young boys in the film, have a preoccupation with Scarface —
MG: (interrupting, smiling broadly) Well, that’s an idea to talk about the confusion between reality and fiction. They are like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in a modern way, you know? But it could be Scarface, it could be anything.
BS: That’s interesting, because Scarface seems to have a pan-cultural appeal, as well as a lot of currency in the African-American hip hop culture…
MG: That is interesting. Actually, yesterday evening there was a screening with (Scarface screenwriter) Oliver Stone there, and I wished I could have asked him about that. All what makes me curious.
BS: What was his reaction to Gomorrah?
MG: He said liked it a lot.
BS: The film has set box office records in Italy. Was that surprising to you, given the subject matter?
MG: Well, we expected success, because the book was very popular, but we couldn’t expect such big success because the movie is quite different, and the structure mixes many stories. There isn’t a hero that fights against the bad people. It’s a gangster movie, but a gangster movie without a character at the top — there’s no [evil] boss. Instead of the emperor, it’s more like we see all the slaves. And when it came out in Italy it came out with subtitles, because the dialect was so strict that no one could understand. Only people from that region, and maybe the center of Naples, could understand. That was another [commercial] risk, but fortunately the audience [embraced] discovering such reality, without any filter.
BS: The end of the film makes mention of the mob’s 200,000 supporters, and you also mentioned Roberto Saviano needing police protection, so what does the modern war on the Camorra look like?
MG: Well, the book and the movie are complementary, and together became explosive, because now all the world knows about the Camorra — the government couldn’t ignore that, they had to do something. They declared war against Camorra and brought the army into Naples. That’s the situation. For sure, it’s good, but the army is not enough if you don’t start to solve the problem from inside. It’s important to understand why it’s so strong, and why people don’t trust in governmental institutions, which is the real problem.
The teaser trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, if you need it. Man… can’t wait for the five-minute comedy bit where Shia LaBeouf’s parents still think he’s masturbating, despite presence of giant robots.
From The 213, Telly Davidson’s take on Right America: Feeling Wronged, Alexandra Pelosi’s new HBO documentary about “those for whom the economy hasn’t worked since Ford and Carter,” and thus fear that guy, now president, with the funny name, and love the give-’em-hell-facts-be-damned moxie of that personable Sarah Palin. The hour-long doc debuts tonight, and then enjoys rebroadcasts on February 19, 22 and 25, as well as March 7 and 10.
The red band trailer for Crank 2: High Voltage, starring Jason Statham, is an awesome thing — a phantasmagoric swirl of profanity, scantily clad women, editorial choices that would make Michael Bay proud, and even a mullet-sporting Corey Haim. It makes great, smart use of The Crystal Method’s “The Name of the Game” (also used to slick, head-bobbing effect in Tropic Thunder), and also reveals that those nipple-taped photographs of Amy Smart that leaked last summer weren’t purely illicit candid shots… they’re in the movie! Oh, plus it ends with B-roll footage. Good times. Over-the-top, as it should be. Well played, Lionsgate…
