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That Melissa Leo rocks is a given. Otherwise, underneath its indie-school charm and digi-cam realism, FrozenRiver is an interesting, involving, but not entirely persuasive social melodrama very similar in its fashion to the kind Joe Mankiewicz and Richard Brooks made in the ‘50s. Writer-director Courtney Hunt knock us over the head with some hammy symbolism, as Leo’s distraught, abandoned mother and Misty Upham’s resentful, bigoted Mohawk miss strive to live up to the “American Dream” of advertising brochures, by engaging in a spot of people smuggling over the frozen St Lawrence river. The screenplay, and the actresses, initially conjure an effective, wryly tense journey when the jockeying for the upper hand between its two central women drives the story. In some ways it’s actually a kind of western in mumblecore garb.
Like too much contemporary indie cinema, however, the surface, tactile immediacy is betrayed by a series of marketplace-fit plot arcs, in what’s really a girl-power buddy movie. The attempts to weave a general socio-political net, tying together the failing heroines with fears of terrorism and immigration, go a couple of steps too far without really engaging, and a last-act swerve into vaguely noir action and morally grave reckoning is unpersuasive. Such lapses disappoint given the effective location filming and persuasive sense of oppressive straits. It’s not bad, but might have been far better.
