Frozen River Blu-ray offers solid video and decent audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
Strapped for money and having been deserted by her husband, working class Ray
(Melissa Leo), reluctantly teams up with Lila (Misty Upham), a widowed Mohawk
Indian, to smuggle illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River from
Canada to the U.S. in the trunk of a Dodge Spirit. Both women swear each trip will
be their last, but one final run across the river leads to a showdown with the law on
all sides.
For more about Frozen River and the Frozen River Blu-ray release, see the Frozen River Blu-ray Review published by Casey Broadwater on June 21, 2009 where this Blu-ray release scored 3.5 out of 5.
In a letter to a friend, Czech writer Franz Kafka once wrote "I think we ought to read only books
that bite and sting us What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the
death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we'd been
banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the
frozen sea within us." If you substitute the word film for book in Kafka's confident,
if unbalanced assertion, then Frozen River, the little seen but largely acclaimed 2008 drama
from writer/director Courtney Hunt, fits his grim criteria with room to spare. Frozen River is
bleak and matter-of-fact in its documentary-like examination of poverty, and honest in its portrayal
of the dark trials a mother will endure to provide for her brood.
A woman with no way out.
Frozen River opens on a dismal grey and wind-swept landscape, with the horizon line as
the only feature to differentiate the earth from the sky. This is the North Country of upstate New
York, where the borders between America, Canada, and the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation bleed
and overlap indefinably. From here, the film cuts to a similarly battered vistathe creased and
chapped face of Ray Eddy (Oscar-nominated Melissa Leo) as she cries on her front stoop and tries
to pull together the emotional wherewithal to make it through another day. The camera frames
her unflinchingly; every line of her face speaks to a hard life, every tear-stained rivulet a
squelched dream. Within the first five minutes of the film it's clear what we're in for as an
audiencea beautifully broken and true-to-life performance from Melissa Leo, who does indeed
elevate Frozen River from just another down-and-out indie offering to something
breathable and real.
Ray Eddy is a clerk at the Yankee Dollar discount store, a mother of two, and the wife of a
gambling-addict husband who has run off to Atlantic City with the down payment for the house
of her dreamsa doublewide trailer with three bedrooms and a Jacuzzi tub. While searching for
him at a nearby bingo parlor, Ray finds her husband's car, albeit now being driven by Lila
Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a young Mohawk mother who thought the car had been abandoned.
Lila convinces Ray to sell the car to a smuggler across the border, but this is quickly revealed to
be a ruse. When they arrive at the smuggler's trailer, he ushers two Chinese men into the trunk
of the car, hands Ray a packet of money, and confirms that the other half of the dough is waiting
at the drop point. Since her children are subsiding on popcorn and Tang, and since this smuggling
business seems to be easy money, Ray agrees to do a few more runs with Lila, vowing to quit
when she scrapes together the cash to buy her doublewide. Of course, all does not go as planned,
and when the police and tribal council get wind of their border crossing operation, Ray is forced
into an ethical dilemma that will affect the lives of both women and their children. Frozen River could've easily come across like a ham-fisted Big Issues movie, but writer
and director Courtney Hunt thankfully imbues the film with subtleties that point out social
problems without delivering a lecture (Crash, anyone?). Immigrants are smuggled across
the border, yes, but this isn't a movie about border control or immigration policy. The story is
entrenched in the lives of its characters, not the socio-political agenda of its creator. It's a human
tale about desperation, pure and simple, and about the mental, emotional, and even criminal
barriers that a woman is able to cross when her family's livelihood is on the line. That said,
Hunt's portrayal of poverty's landscape is visually acutesee the littered front yards, the why try
trailer exteriors, the small and cluttered rooms. The American Dream pushes everyonerich and
poor aliketo live beyond their means, and this is hinted at by the huge, flat-panel, Rent-to-Own
television that overwhelms Ray's tiny living room like the monolith from 2001: A Space
Odyssey.
While Melissa Leo's performance is stunningreally, this is enough to see the film alone
Frozen River isn't perfect. Certain plot points are ice-thin and many of the surrounding
actors just can't live up to Leo's weary authenticity. The ending too may strike some as
implausible, and patently optimistic for a film that has trudged through so much hard-earned
grief, but I felt it was the only moment of artifice in an otherwise dead-on narrative. This kind of
material can often slip into the sentimental, but Frozen River parses the weepy nonsense
of similar stories and gives us the cold, hard facts.
Frozen River was filmed on video in 720p and makes the transition to this 1080p AVC
MPEG-4 transfer relatively unscathed. While I'm not often fond of video, the medium suits the
subject matter here, giving Frozen River a gritty documentary vibe. As such, many of the
issues I have with the film visually are by-products of the source material and not necessarily of the
transfer. Video is generally poor at handling dynamic levels of contrast, and it shows in the
overblown whites that make up some of the film's skies. Black levels are strong, for the most part,
but there were one or two scenes (Lila in the tree, in particular) that were much too dark and had
me craning toward my display to make out detail. Naturally, these dark moments also harbor the
film's most intense digital noise. Like I said, though, video is an effective choice for Frozen
River, and this is apparent in that first, brilliant close-up of Melissa Leo. The lines of her tired
face are sharp, almost unrelenting, and her splotchy skin tones are rendered with unhindered
realism. This is what it looks like when a broken woman cries.
This Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track certainly gets the job done, but I couldn't help but feel it was
dynamically flat. Imagine the deep, bone splitting crack of ice as it groans apart, feet crunching
through the snow at a hurried pace, the wind whipping violently overhead. Can you hear that? I
can too, and I really wish it was represented more fully in Frozen River's audio offering.
Still, I understand that sound effects are not always the chief concern during a lower-budget shoot,
and with that in mind, the sound here completely suffices. Voices are clear and clean, ambient
noises occasionally grace the rear channels, and the soundtracka haunting and reverb-heavy
guitar dronefills the sound field with an appropriate, melancholy menace.
Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Courtney Hunt and Producer Heather
Rae
This track, while not uninformative, is a bit of a disappointment. As two women in a largely male-
dominated field, and with a film that deals with such broad (not in that way) issues, I was hoping
that Hunt and Rae might speak more to the challenges and expectations faced by female
filmmakers, or opine about poverty and race issues in North America. What we get, instead, are dry,
day-by-day comments about the physical act of shooting the film. I wouldn't go so far as to call it
boring, but the commentary certainly doesn't make watching the film any less bleak. Theatrical Trailer and Previews (1080p)
The titular frozen river, as a symbol, aptly describes the economic and emotional thin ice that Ray
perilously skates. One small crack could send her into a deadly undercurrent of debt and familial
disintegration. Small, first-time productions such as Frozen River also tread on perilous
terrainbudgets get cut, schedules are tight, and the critical/financial response is a great, icy
unknown. It's good to see, then, that Frozen River weathered the proverbial storms and
came through as a strong debut from director Courtney Hunt, and I definitely look forward to
Northline, her next project. Though it may not wow home theater buffs with technical glitz,
Frozen River offers up a far humbler but more substantive honesty, and while I wouldn't
recommend it as a blind-buy (this isn't a film you'll watch often), it's certainly worth checking out.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced four new release and catalog titles coming soon to Blu-ray. For all four releases, video will be presented in 1080p AVC accompanied by a 5.1 Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. Additionally, all titles will be BD-Live ready so ...
