Touches You

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Hard living in the reservation, becomes even more ungiving against the bitter cold and frozen north. While this film succeeds in painting that lifeless landscape, the people are as unsympathetic toward each other as well. Ray is hard-edged as a 50 something white woman whose no-good gambling husband finally left for good, leaving her, a small child and an angry 15 year old teen. More than her match is Lila, who wore the same dour expression throughout the movie. No one seems to like each other. Ok I get that, life is hard on the reservation. But these people dont seem to be helping themselves either. The biggest complaint comes when Ray (Melissa Leo) is caught smuggling two chinese women, asks the cop, who was the most sympathetic voice in this whole ordeal, how long would she be locked up. "Four years", he says, "unless you are on a watch list". She was relieved. Only 4 years ? Thats easy money for taking a small risk - it should be 10 years and $100,000 fine. This is hardly a deterrent. The director and writer seem single-focused on just one thing. That to portray poverty and hopelessness. But hardly offers a solution.

Melissa Leo first came to my attention when I saw "The Fighter". She won an Academy Award for her role as the hardened mother, the type who makes you feel as if you're walking on eggshells (she let slip a curse word during her acceptance speech).Two years earlier Leo had played a lead role in "Frozen River". She plays Ray, a woman working a minimum wage job and living in a double-wide mobile home. When her husband disappears with the family's money, Ray joins up with Lila (Misty Upham), a Mohawk woman, and they start transporting illegal immigrants across the US-Canada border.Almost every scene in this movie tenses the viewer up. Whether it's the claustrophobic settings or the risks of something happening during the transports, the movie pulls no punches in its focus on the marginalized sectors of society. The snow and ice emphasize the desperation that drives these women to start breaking the law. I recommend it, as I do every movie in which I've seen Melissa Leo. Too bad about Misty Upham's untimely death in 2014.

The river in question is the St Lawrence dividing the United States and Canada, more specifically a stretch between New York state and Quebec province where the Mohawk nation lives on both sides. This is not a corner of America that one normally views in film. People here are dirt poor, literally living from pay cheque to pay cheque and searching for a little money down the back of the sofa. Again this is not a vision of the USA that we see much on screen. Two single mothers - the white Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) and the Mohawk Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) - become unlikely allies in a struggle to provide for their kids in this unusual and moving tale both written and directed by Courtney Hunt. This is the kind of different work that perhaps would only come from a female independent film-maker.

I admit I only watched this because I heard that Melissa Leo (who played Detective Howard in Homicide) had won some sort of recognition for putting in a good performance. It sounded like a good film on that basis and I wasn't disappointed. Frozen River offers a slice of life across the other side of the world (for me), it was appropriate watching it in the middle of a heatwave as others in the northern hemisphere (in certain regions) are experiencing these sorts of conditions at this time of year.It ticks all the right boxes of being interesting the whole way through, being well casted and acted. Detective Howard was more of a peripheral character on Homicide so it was good to see what Leo could do with a lead role. Upham is a good supporting actor and doesn't ruin suspension of disbelief due to crappy acting or anything (same for the child actors).The Native American aspect gives the film a unique flavour so in fact it is appealing from a number of different angles. It's fairly safe to watch with a general audience (no swearing that I can recall), some shots are fired and that's about as extreme as it gets.