I wanted to go back to Neil Campbell’s post last month on Sin Nombre and Frozen River. I’m still working on Sin Nombre, but I finally had a chance to see Frozen River this week. I definitely agree with Neil’s comments that the film reminds us
“that the post-Western’s chameleon shape-shifting continues deep into the twenty-first century, looking to re-energize its generic elements into new and different patterns. Frozen River’s story is of the north country of New York state, near the little city of Massena on the St. Lawrence River and the Mohawk Nation reserve at Akwesasne – “the rez” – that straddles both the mile-wide river and the US-Canadian border. Melissa Leo (its leading actress) was advised by the director Courtney Hunt to watch John Wayne’s ‘reined in’ style of acting and in many other ways both her film and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre reflect the intertextual influences of the Western on contemporary filmmaking.”
Melissa Leo, in the role of Ray Eddy, very effectively evokes Wayne at various times, not only in terms of acting style but in the delivery of some of her lines. The uneasy relationship that Ray develops with Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) also echoes the long history of white/American Indian pairs in westerns, from Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, although Lila is by no means anyone’s “faithful companion.” Lila emerges as a complicated character, distinctive and individualized, and, like Ray, she has her own agenda in taking part in the smuggling operation, and those agendas sometimes conflict (as do the characters) and sometimes converge.
The characters cross the border between the US and Canada over the frozen river (and, as Lila points out, a border is a matter of perspective, as Mohawk land is continuous on both sides of the national line), and the scenes of driving across the expanse of the river are evocative of the vast desert landscapes of the classic western. The scenes on the river are bleak and beautiful, and the danger posed by this harsh environment is very real (as indicated when their car breaks through the ice at one point).
One nice and playful western reference in the film is the merry-go-round / carousel that Ray’s son T. J. is working on throughout the film. The merry-go-round has the only horses in this western, and we don’t really notice that they are horses until the end of the film when T. J. finishes his work, and, for the first time, we see the horses in motion.
It’s interesting to think of the film in comparison to The Searchers (speaking of John Wayne). Both Lila and Ray are outsiders, marginalized members of their own communities, but whereas The Searchers ends famously with Wayne framed in the doorway, outside the family and continually an outsider in the community, the movement in Frozen River is in the opposite direction—toward bringing the characters back into the family and the community. A key moment in the film involves a character coming back inside a house, rather than continuing on, in traditional western fashion, into the landscape.







