7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 3.8 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Strapped for money and having been deserted by her husband, working class Ray (Melissa Leo), reluctantly teams up with Lila (Misty Upham), a widowed Mohawk Indian, to smuggle illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canada to the U.S. in the trunk of a Dodge Spirit. Both women swear each trip will be their last, but one final run across the river leads to a showdown with the law on all sides.
Starring: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Michael O'Keefe, Mark Boone JuniorCrime | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
English, English SDH, French
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
BD-Live
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
In a letter to a friend, Czech writer Franz Kafka once wrote “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us…What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we’d been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” If you substitute the word film for book in Kafka’s confident, if unbalanced assertion, then Frozen River, the little seen but largely acclaimed 2008 drama from writer/director Courtney Hunt, fits his grim criteria with room to spare. Frozen River is bleak and matter-of-fact in its documentary-like examination of poverty, and honest in its portrayal of the dark trials a mother will endure to provide for her brood.
A woman with no way out.
Frozen River was filmed on video in 720p and makes the transition to this 1080p AVC MPEG-4 transfer relatively unscathed. While I'm not often fond of video, the medium suits the subject matter here, giving Frozen River a gritty documentary vibe. As such, many of the issues I have with the film visually are by-products of the source material and not necessarily of the transfer. Video is generally poor at handling dynamic levels of contrast, and it shows in the overblown whites that make up some of the film's skies. Black levels are strong, for the most part, but there were one or two scenes (Lila in the tree, in particular) that were much too dark and had me craning toward my display to make out detail. Naturally, these dark moments also harbor the film's most intense digital noise. Like I said, though, video is an effective choice for Frozen River, and this is apparent in that first, brilliant close-up of Melissa Leo. The lines of her tired face are sharp, almost unrelenting, and her splotchy skin tones are rendered with unhindered realism. This is what it looks like when a broken woman cries.
This Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track certainly gets the job done, but I couldn't help but feel it was dynamically flat. Imagine the deep, bone splitting crack of ice as it groans apart, feet crunching through the snow at a hurried pace, the wind whipping violently overhead. Can you hear that? I can too, and I really wish it was represented more fully in Frozen River's audio offering. Still, I understand that sound effects are not always the chief concern during a lower-budget shoot, and with that in mind, the sound here completely suffices. Voices are clear and clean, ambient noises occasionally grace the rear channels, and the soundtrack—a haunting and reverb-heavy guitar drone—fills the sound field with an appropriate, melancholy menace.
Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Courtney Hunt and Producer Heather
Rae
This track, while not uninformative, is a bit of a disappointment. As two women in a largely male-
dominated field, and with a film that deals with such broad (not in that way) issues, I was hoping
that Hunt and Rae might speak more to the challenges and expectations faced by female
filmmakers, or opine about poverty and race issues in North America. What we get, instead, are dry,
day-by-day comments about the physical act of shooting the film. I wouldn't go so far as to call it
boring, but the commentary certainly doesn't make watching the film any less bleak.
Theatrical Trailer and Previews (1080p)
The titular frozen river, as a symbol, aptly describes the economic and emotional thin ice that Ray perilously skates. One small crack could send her into a deadly undercurrent of debt and familial disintegration. Small, first-time productions such as Frozen River also tread on perilous terrain—budgets get cut, schedules are tight, and the critical/financial response is a great, icy unknown. It's good to see, then, that Frozen River weathered the proverbial storms and came through as a strong debut from director Courtney Hunt, and I definitely look forward to Northline, her next project. Though it may not wow home theater buffs with technical glitz, Frozen River offers up a far humbler but more substantive honesty, and while I wouldn't recommend it as a blind-buy (this isn't a film you'll watch often), it's certainly worth checking out.
Limited Edition
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1942
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