Economies of Scale: Courtney Hunt's Frozen River

 Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Michael O'Keefe, Charlie McDermott, Mark Boone, Jr. Dir. Courtney Hunt, Sony Pictures Classics, 2008

****

When I came to Mississippi from Cincinnati in 2006, I traded a bed in a homeless shelter for men for a bed in a singlewide trailer in a 'park on the storied outskirts of town. Before the homeless shelter I spent two weeks sleeping in a park, in unfinished basements, and walking the streets of Downtown all night to stay warm, nodding off for 10-20 minutes at a time in sheltered doorways. Friends helped me eat if I couldn't get to a soup kitchen. A local ministry gave away bagged lunches. I lived on bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread and hot pockets cooked in c-store microwaves.

At the trailer park, my girlfriend and I had an old Chevy Lumina for which our neighbor, her best friend, put up the down payment. The Chevy had no air conditioning. Average temperatures in Oxford, Ms. that August lingered in the high 90s, without the heat index, and I often hung my head out the window as she drove, trying to get air cool enough to breathe.

Her best friend's husband beat her best friend for helping us with the payment until she called the repo agency. We came up with money for an old Astro van, which overheated and sprayed power steering fluid all over the windshield if we drove faster than 50 mph. My girlfriend, a custodian at University of Mississippi, had to take out title loans on the Astro a few times so we could meet our other bills. The state of Mississippi took about a quarter of each check for her mandatory contributions to the state employee pension fund. Ole Miss got another quarter for her health insurance.

We spent two years together and not a month passed without tapdancing while juggling chainsaws and live grenades to cover rent, food, gas, and the light bill, or to keep up payments on a title loan. Some months we had to pay half the rent from one check, half from the other (state employees are paid on the 15th and 30th of every month.) My Mom supplied us with a $300 Walmart gift card every month to cover groceries and paid for us to have internet access.

It was never not stressful. It was seldom fun, though we tried our damnedest to kid ourselves otherwise. That life embodied the cliche of two people drowning while trying to hold each other above the waterline. It sure beat the homeless shelter, though, as the shelter felt like heaven after even two weeks on the street.

Economies of scale. Someone always has it worse than you, and you can always go back there, yourself.

I thought of those days as I watched writer/director Courtney Hunt's 2008 drama, Frozen River. Concerning two women in upstate New York driven by need and working-poverty to smuggle the undocumented across the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canda into the US, Frozen River reminded me how good I have it today, still living below federal poverty guidelines. My Dad left me some money in trust, of which I receive $300/mo. Mom apportioned my inheritance from her to let me live now. She said she couldn't watch me live in homeless shelters anymore. I have food to eat, heat and light and water, and I can sit and watch movies on my 32" HDTV, an old Vizio a neighbor gave me.

Melissa Leo and Misty Upham don't have it so comfy. Leo, a part timer at a dollar-store (her boss sees her as a "short-timer) feeds her two sons popcorn and Tang for dinner every night. Upham, a Mohawk woman living on the reservation, cannot see well enough without glasses to hold down a job. Her family has stolen her one year-old from her. Leo's husband, a gambling addict, disappears with the family's money a week before Christmas. Upham is barely tolerated on the reservation for her participation in smuggling first cigarettes and then humans, which costs her husband's life. The tribe wants to expell her.

The two women form an uneasy partnership to continue the smuggling because Leo owns a car with a push-button trunk, which the "snakeheads" on each side of the border prefer. Their drive to keep their kids safe or get them back gradually binds them, each needing the other to survive.

Courtney Hunt brings their world, so similar to and yet so different from ones I've known and still know, to bleak, brutal life with a degree of authenticity I can attest is true. Melissa Leo looks and acts like women I've known in trailer parks, shelters, and halfway houses, like a beaten-down warrior unable to stop fighting lest she lose her few advantages. Upham's rage and grief at the loss of her son war with her resignation and sense of defeat. Their devotion to their kids' survival allows the audience to see their strength, their humanity as they do what they must to preserve family, to continue treading water as poverty threatens to engulf them.

Leo's 15 year-old son, T.J., (Charlie McDermott) swindles an elderly woman out of her credit card number, exchanging it for a Hot Wheels car set for his little brother's Christmas present. McDermott's reading of TJ blends adolescent defiance and vulnerability, cynicism over his disappeared dad and bewilderment at his betrayal in a performance that made my heart hurt. He matches Leo and Upham beat for beat.

Frozen River is at least grim, and wondrously unapologetic. Though Hunt's screenplay makes both women sympathetic, it never rationalizes their actions, never says their own victimization cancels out their participation in others'. They do what they must do, and they are who they are, the audience can take them or leave them. Leo and Upham, and the women I've known like them, don't have time for your condemnation. They have work to do, bills to pay, and families to protect.

Frozen River is the best kind of social realism film. It concludes in a brokered peace, Leo in jail but both families banded together, Upham and McDermott unlikely surrogate parents for the next four months. Hunt doesn't graft on a Hollywood ending, doesn't make unrealistic promises about any of the characters' futures, other than they have one. For now.

Still, someone always has it worse, and that someone could always be you. Economies of scale.