I’m mainly putting a placeholder here, and a little shout of joy at two recent, wonderful film experiences — both of which I want to write more about, and around each/both of which I have been thinking through the ways certain hard-nosed depictions of Grim family emotions and realities are teased out through certain escapist genre conventions. But I don’t have time, nor have I really gotten my head around this analysis. So, for the moment, I’ll say:
—Coraline is the best children’s film in years, which may be faint praise, but add this: it’s also one of the best films I’ve seen in some time, rich in glorious technique and baroque narrative detail and the flush of emotions (fear, despair, joy, awe) of the best fairy tales. The 3d version is … well, stunning, but I think I’d have loved the film regardless.
–So different on the surface–in technique, theme, intended audience–that it might seem like a wholly different medium, Frozen River shows up two of the best performances from last year (Melissa Leo and Misty Upham) in a tale that begins in the familiar backroads small-town deadends of any number of great film noirs. It plays a little like dirty realism, hung on a suspense-thriller hook–and it’s just wonderful, and heartbreaking, in so many ways.
See ’em both. I’d really like to talk about them.
I liked Frozen River a lot, but I’m not too sure what all the fuss is about. Melissa Leo is good–extremely well cast–but I don’t think her’s is an extraordinary performance. Leo seems to be playing well within the boundaries of expectations (her work in “The Wire” is no more or no less memorable). I’m going to argue against film noir and dirty realism to suggest the film is a recognizable update of the classic woman’s picture from the 1930s and 1940s. In this case, to borrow from Mary Ann Doane, Molly Haskell and others, Frozen River is a maternal “sacrifice” film in which both Leo’s and Upham’s characters are forced to make difficult choices in order to protect the welfare of their children. Plus, Leo’s character, despite all the tattooed markings of rebellious living, is nearly saintly in her motherly duties. Her kids are darned near perfect. I guess I was actually missing the “dirty realism.” But that is a totally other kind of film. Frozen River is certainly grim on the surface, but it’s about as threatening as apple pie when you dig a bit deeper. Still, solidly entertaining. By the way, is it me or does Leo look a bit too much like Bonnie Raitt. That might explain Michael O’Keefe’s presense. Then again, he’s currently a practicing Zen priest, so who am I to cast aspersions.
“…as threatening as apple pie…”
What? I really like your point connecting to women’s sacrifice films, but I didn’t get the above quote at all. I guess I empathized pretty strongly with the relentless yet unswaggering anxiety about poverty which lays over the whole landscape like a smog. The morning ritual, where Leo scrounges the couch for change to get her kids food–certainly doesn’t have the edge promised by the ostensibly terrifying smuggler plot (with the seedy, nasally-Quebecoised Mark Boone as a sleazy human trafficker), but I actually thought the small details–the small pains and small scares–far more effectively returned our attention to the deeper malaise of poverty.
Thinking through my last post — I think the noir “hook” (the turn to crime, the presence of a gun–and Chekhov’s dictum, the arrival of two recognizable male presences [Boone and O’Keefe] on either side of the law & these women) sets up certain expectations which the film mutes. But I don’t read that muting as a dismissal of threat, or a diminishment “inside” the genre — I think the hook is a feint. We start paying more attention to the way the women interact, and (as I noted just above) to the little unshowy precise details of their daily lives. And I found it riveting.
I do like the link to sacrifice films; what I like more here is that the final sacrifices demanded of these women are, even ‘though constricted by the contexts of community and fiscal pressure, chosen by them. I’ll avoid spoilers, but the film turns again from the “big” finale to a smaller semi-happy end, Leo’s character sacrificing not for her kids but for Upham, and some hint of purpose moving through that.
SPOILERS
All I’m saying is that the ill effects of poverty (the smoggy, frozen landscapes of despair) are nowhere to found within the characters moving about on the screen. They live lives marked by poverty, but their “character” (morals, ethics, values, etc.) has in no way been seriously jeopardized (did you for a minute imagine that trailer was going to go up in flames). Again, I’ll turn to “The Wire” as an example of a more complex engagement with poverty in America. Empathy? To a certain degree, yes. Mostly, I projected what I was seeing on the screen onto the kinds of lives I imagine are actually being led in America at this moment in history. I never felt threatened by the economic depravity–Leo’s screen kids certainly look well-fed and psychologically well-adjusted. Yes, who wants to live in such conditions, but the film seems to gloss over the brutal, material realities of economic crisis and degradation in favor of a hopeful, “feel-good” narrative. Yes, the popcorn, the lunch money, the baby in a basket, the Asians in the car trunk . . . all work to present a picture, but said picture, in the end (for me), was a bit disingenuous. I’m beating up on the film far too much, but Frozen River would have been a lot harder to swallow (and a lot more difficult to produce) if it had been more “truthful” (say, in a neo-realist sort of way). And since I am teaching a women & film course at the moment, the film doesn’t seem to offer any real options for the females on the screen. I won’t argue that it rigidly produces the positionality of the female spectator, but I’m not exactly sure how different it is from other “women’s pictures.” In fact, part of the complex appeal of those old classics was the Hollywood star around which such films were constructed (so many ways of producing meaning around the spectators’ identification). Melissa Leo doesn’t quite cut the mustard there (imagine Dame Meryl Streep in that role) but maybe that’s the point. I blather . . .
I guess what I *like* about the film is exactly its tendency to mute the melodrama possible in its crime plot or its impoverished mise-en-scene. The popcorn, the scrounging for change, the relative decency of everyone involved — I guess I know these people, felt like the feint of the crime-story led us into a recognizable world where scraping by is not one penny away from debasement–I know/knew lots of people with rented appliances often repo’ed, trailers two generations past good, a general anxiety that one lost paycheck could mean something really horrible. Hell, add thirty or forty (or sixty) pounds and an infatuation with god, and Leo’s character could pass for a bunch of my relatives.
I wish the film had avoided the crime stuff altogether, but the ‘feint’ provides a useful hook not just to frame a narrative but to more expeditiously open up the characters… A bit of wrapping paper, gussying up what is at heart an unshowy slice of daily life. Sure, it’s not The Wire, but that’s a film less about people in poverty than the systems which reproduce poverty and inequality. Frozen River is small-scale, tight-framed….
FYI. Post four was being written when post three was uploaded . . . so #4 is in no way a response to #3 but, instead, a response to #2. Speaking of number two . . .
And then post #5 appeared out of nowhere!
Also, this film is set close to where you grew up, no?
Sort of close to my home; really close to where I went to college…
Coraline is stunning. Probably the best film I’ve seen this year. I could quibble (I wish the narrative invested as much energy in defining the other-mother’s desires as it does Coraline’s), but this is a visually stimulating, wondrously strange, fantastically surreal film for all ages. This was also the first time I’ve experieced Real-D and, man, I was so off-base in terms of expectations. It took me a while to adjust my eyes (I’m still getting used to wearing glasses; glasses on top of glasses is even more disorienting), but once I found a comfortable position, I was hooked. Bring on James Cameron’s Aviator!