Frozen River

“Frozen River”

USA. 2008. Written and directed by Courtney Hunt. Starring: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Michael O’Keefe, Mark Boone Junior, Charlie McDermott, James Reilly, Nancy Wu, Michael Sky, John Canoe, Pun Bandhu, Jay Klaitz, Dylan Carusona, Rajesh Rose, Joey Chanlin and Adam Lukens.

Rating: ★★★½

In the very first shot of Melissa Leo in Frozen River, the camera pans a close-up from her shoe up to her face filled with lines and wrinkles. Few actresses (and actors) would want a close-up like that in this day and age of Botox and face-lifts and it is rewarding to see a movie that treats such a face in a simultaneously natural yet elegantly artful light. The first-time writer and director Courtney Hunt uses it to open a vividly compelling portrait of people who live in or around Mohawk territory near the U.S.-Canadian border and whose sole drive for their sudden criminal decisions are to ensure that proper food is on the table for their families.

We soon understand that Leo’s character, Ray Eddy was crying in her car in that close-up because her husband has run off with most of their saved income to feed on his gambling addiction. Her dream of moving to a bigger trailer home has thus shattered and she and her 15-year old son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and 5-year old son, Ricky (James Reilly) are literally living on popcorn and Tang for all three meals until her next payday. T.J. suggests that he should get a job, too, but Ray, as a mother, of course, will not bear to see him quit school to share the burden.

As she later discovers her husband’s car being driven by someone else, she follows it and meets the other lead character in the film, Lila Littlejohn (Misty Upham), a Mohawk who also lives in a trailer all by herself. Her mother-in-law has recently taken her one-year old child away from her and seems hardly liked or really respected by her fellow Mohawks in the reservation. While Lila mainly works at the bingo game hall, but during the dead of winter, she is also involved in the business of smuggling illegal immigrants across the border through a river of ice, which the policemen cannot chase through because it is right above Mohawk territory and the inhabitants keep strict sovereignty over it.

Initially, she lures and tricks Ray into a smuggling job at gunpoint (with Ray’s own gun that is snatched away) since she believes that Ray, being a Caucasian woman, will be less likely to be stopped by a state trooper (Michael O’Keefe) on the way after crossing the river. With the $1200-$2000 that is paid for each trip, however, and considering that her boss at Yankee One Dollar has for years refused to upgrade her job from half-time to full-time status in favor of a younger female employee, Ray figures the smuggling will pay far better. She thus goes back and the two women strike an unusual alliance driving Chinese and Pakistani people across the river in the trunk of their car.

The “alliance,” if you can even call it that in the beginning, is especially fascinating because it is formed not by any soft sentiment or sympathy but on a common need. The two women know they are together in this illegal endeavor simply because they are impelled by economic and financial desperation and there is no sharing of secrets about their separate troubles. Their very sparse conversations during the smuggling trips back and forth are all based on practicality or the dangers and the urgency of their predicaments. This is where the two actresses’ performances are so crucial and absolutely stunning because, almost completely apart from the strictly pragmatic dialogue, they somehow manage to create an emotional entry into their increasing turmoil and perhaps a slowly growing bond.

This has been a really good year for independent movies that cast character actors in lead roles and seek emotional subtlety over movie star value with The Visitor earlier and this film (and coincidentally, both films also grapple with the issue of immigration). Like Richard Jenkins in that other film, Leo’s face is probably more recognizable than her name, particularly to people who saw her on the TV show, Homicide: Life on the Street and in 21 Grams as Benicio Del Toro’s wife (look her up on IMDb). What she continually proves here in a rare lead role (and she should really get more) is her willingness to play absolutely close to the bone and her consistent refusal to sacrifice authenticity for glamour. And she is matched scene for scene by Upham, who, in some ways, has the riskier challenge of making us look past her initial subterfuge and ultimately create a natural sense of empathy equal to Leo’s character.

The movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance this year, is an impressive debut for writer/director Courtney Hunt. Beyond showing a real keen visual eye for utilizing natural light to paint a paradoxically, beautifully bleak landscape on HD video (despite its limitations) with her cinematographer, Reed Morano, she must have had an instinctive feel for this story reportedly based on actual border smugglers living in upstate New York. In handling this material, she gains real power by mostly burying the emotions in the situations rather than spelling it out in blunt dialogue. And the situations do not shy away from showing some feelings of prejudice that creep up as when Ray decides to dump what turns out to be an invaluable duffel bag belonging to the Pakistani couple, fearing “it might contain poison gas.”

So skillfully does Hunt paint her characters in the first two-thirds of her film that I probably could have done without some of the thriller elements towards the end. There are obviously some potentially fateful, dire consequences for what the women do but the final developments and confrontations do feel stacked up and a bit too plot-heavy. Still, as a thriller, the film avoids cheapening its story with unnecessary violence and, though a gun is fired on occasion, it is filmed in such a de-emphasizing way that sometimes only lets us just hear the shot in the background rather than see the gun in the foreground.

Despite the almost complete lack of actual on-screen violence (and the film’s R rating for just a handful of curse words is really just ridiculous), most people would probably compare the film to other movies about people making bad decisions such as Fargo and A Simple Plan. What sets Frozen River apart is how, in both its characters and its tone, there is not a shred of strangeness or absurdity in its scenario, as what pushes these people to criminal behavior is not greed or malevolence but simply survival. And as the movie rather surprisingly manages to bring back a great amount of humanity and even heroism in the midst of its quietly sad conclusion, we can only think back on that opening scene whose resonance and poignancy has only deepened to allow us to finally imagine our own closing image for Leo’s character.

The Secret Life of Bees

“The Secret Life of Bees”

USA. 2008. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Screenplay adapted by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Based on the novel written by Sue Monk Kidd. Starring: Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys, Paul Bettany, Tristan Wilds, Nate Parker, Shondrella Avery and Renee Clark.

Rating: ★★★

There is little doubt that Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees aims straight for the heart and not for strict realism. The rural Deep South of 1964, the year when the Civil Rights Act had been passed, could have never been this hopeful and this optimistic. But as a kind of escapist fantasy depiction of a symbolic refuge from the harsh feelings of racism and familial abandonment at the historical time, the story succeeds earnestly and movingly.

The key place of refuge is the home of August Boatwright (Queen Latifah), who runs a big bee honey business with her two younger siblings, May (Sophie Okonedo) and June (Alicia Keys). Look at the casting and we gather a sense of how much conviction they can bring to what could be just maudlin material (including Keys, who may not have acted much but whom I think always had an actress in her by the forcefulness she brings to her songs). All three strike such different emotional nuances from August’s level-headed yet lightly humorous presence to June’s stern rigidity and self-protectiveness and May’s fragile personality that you do not want to perturb with any kind of tragic news.

Into this place arrives a 14-year old girl named Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning). She has been living with her abusive and unloving father, T. Ray (a nearly unrecognizable Paul Bettany) and her housekeeper, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson). When Rosaleen is wrongly arrested after she stands up to some racist men who frown on and then later beat her on her way to register to vote, Lily decides to flee from home and help Rosaleen escape out of the hospital. Along the way, Lily sees a label of a honey jar that has a picture identical to the one she found in a time capsule belonging to her long passed mother whom she always wanted to know more about. Following this label, they find their way to the Boatwrights.

The Boatwright sisters are initially reluctant, particularly June who perhaps senses that the girl will bring too much of her baggage into their place. They decide to take the two in, however, as Rosaleen works with May in the kitchen while August brings Lily out to filter out the honey from the bee hives. Meanwhile, June continues practicing the cello while dealing with her own relationship issues revolving around her hesitation to finally tie the knot with her long-time boyfriend, Neil (Nate Parker).

There are some emotional developments that I have danced around and a few of the more melodramatic moments and sometimes subsequent reconciliations are a little obvious and not quite evenly spaced out. But the movie (which I heard made very few changes to the original source novel that I have not read) is unconventional in how, rather than building everything to one climax, it contains two emotional plateaus in the middle section of the film to reflect the devastating emotional toll of the wounding historical times and it would be unfair to give a hint of what they are. And in the main central current is the story of a girl who seeks love and shelter after surviving 14 years of being deprived of it (and fair warning, there are a couple of scenes of domestic violence) and finds it for a time in the comfort of these surrogate mothers.

Playing that girl who stands as kind of a companion role to her previous controversial film also set in the Deep South, Hounddog (which I have not yet seen), Dakota Fanning really shows a maturation of depth as an actress. Despite her strengths as an actress, she may have been blamed for acting above her age too often in earlier films but not with this film. She, of course, still has the usual fierce mettle and sometimes fiery candor she has shown well in the past. But by playing closer to her age or maybe now that the years have fully caught up to her talents, she in turn is really allowed to show a greater sense of vulnerability through, strangely enough (or perhaps not), more youthfulness.

Writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood and her casting directors, Aisha Coley and Lisa Mae Fincannon have cast the film very well as aforementioned and really it is the deep, resonating performances that carry the film through its more episodic and rough patches. No two actresses from Fanning’s Lily to Hudson, Latifah, Okonedo and Keys strike the same note and every one richly and precisely defines her role. Hudson finally has her first decent film role since her Oscar® win for Dreamgirls while those who have seen British actress, Okonedo in Hotel Rwanda will not be surprised seeing her slip so easily into this complex Southern role. Keys, on the other hand, has the fewest words of dialogue in the film but shows she has real presence to suggest her fiercer nature as a cellist and a civil rights activist as well as other deeper things that she would choose to leave unsaid. And then there is Queen Latifah, who, as usual and true to her name, is never less than authoritative and commanding.

The movie is not an all-around great film and besides a few problems with the pacing, some of the dialogue is a little too on-the-nose. But some movies just lift themselves above the ordinary on the sheer emotional strengths of their characters and performances. We believe in them and thus we believe in the hopeful historical fantasy they inhabit. And as a historical fantasy, The Secret Life of Bees is a small jewel.

Body of Lies

“Body of Lies”

USA. 2008. Directed by Ridley Scott. Screenplay by William Monahan. Based on a novel written by David Ignatius. Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Oscar Isaac, Ali Suliman, Alon Abutbul, Vince Colosimo, Simon McBurney, Mehdi Nebbou and Michael Gaston.

Rating: ★★½

Bewildering modern day politics and Hollywood movie conventions battle for screen time in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies, the latest thriller to literally “rip from today’s headlines,” as the saying goes. The confusion of the story is apt for the fiercely labyrinthine nature of the war on terror, from the cultural barriers to the occasionally careless situational misapprehension. What is film oddly lacks is a consistent sense of urgency about it all.

That is not to say the movie is a complete bust. It is just that there are too many generic movie conventions that really refuse to give way when they should. Director Ridley Scott and his writer, William Monahan (who won an Oscar for the Infernal Affairs remake, The Departed) may claim otherwise, as Scott himself said, “It’s not James Bond with lots of people running around.” But when the main central protagonist, Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a lone hero type globe-trotting in multiple languages, dodging and/or surviving all matter of explosions, gun battles and even brutal torture, and even falling in love with a local woman, we cannot quite believe the situation to be as close to the bone and as far removed from James Bond as the movie is clearly trying to be.

The movie opens with a massive, horrific suicidal bombing that rips through Manchester, England, after the terrorists sense a counter-raid into their hideout. We then meet Ferris as a CIA field agent who runs around making contacts in order to dig up information on this terrorist group led by Al-Saleem (Alon Abutbul). He knows several languages and speaks Arabic fluently enough to be able to disguise as a local but his best efforts are often hampered by his CIA superior, Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), who seemingly just plays by his own rules often without heeding attention to the proper intelligence and insight that Ferris provides him.

This annoys Ferris who, on the ground, believes that a better tie of friendship with the Jordanian intelligence chief, Hani Salaam (Mark Strong) will aid his cause. While he works closer with Salaam despite some distractions from Hoffman and somehow finds time to see a local nurse, Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), who had earlier treated his injuries, Ferris secretly conjures up an insane plan to frame an innocent architect of being a head of a fake terrorist faction. Perhaps then, he believes, this will incite envy and jealousy in Al-Saleem’s real terrorist group and will thus bring them out of hiding.

As the plot description indicates, the movie clicks off numerous locations and director Scott, as usual, gives us a real sense of time and place. Working with cinematographer Alexander Witt and filming mainly around Morocco, he slickly captures the scorching environs that parallel and envelop these political hot zones. From a purely technical and visual standpoint, his approach here probably most closely resembles his great 2001 war film, Black Hawk Down in that he is trying to put us at ground level with the war on terror much like he similarly did with the conflict in Somalia.

The key difference though is that he refused to single out anyone as a de facto hero in that movie and could thus really heighten and even drain the audience with the surging tension and mortality in combat. The fact that this one, as adapted and penned by writer William Monahan from a novel by David Ignatius, has far too easy and conventional characters in the center goes against the realistic atmosphere it is trying to portray. DiCaprio, fine actor as he is, has tried and sometimes succeeded shedding off his pretty boy naïveté in his past movies but, beyond the James Bond-like traits he possesses, his character here is really written and acted as too earnest and sincere. Since the movie does not really suggest a back story for this guy, it would have worked better for Roger to really project more world-weariness to better hint at his experience and cynicism as in a John LeCarre novel or even George Clooney’s character in Syriana. And the character is only made less plausible by the unconvincing romance he shares with Farahani’s Aisha (is there a requirement that DiCaprio have a love interest in almost any film he is in?) including the obligatory but completely false scene when he meets her family and clashes with her sister about politics.

Those elements end up robbing some of the chemistry that could have sparked between him and Russell Crowe, who is aptly deviously relaxed as his CIA superior who unwaveringly believes that the ends justify any and all questionable means he employs. The two actors only have a few scenes face to face and mostly have continual phone conversations (often while Crowe’s character is busy taking care of his family and bringing his kids to school) but somehow we sense that the movie is perhaps going too far with making them utter opposites in their lines of work. That makes their characters not only more increasingly predictable but also less believable that the two would work together or even rub each other away like sandpaper since they don’t ever seem to really find common ground (beyond agreeing on that insane scheme to frame an innocent man as a terrorist, which ends up having some ruinous consequences).

The best character and performance in the movie is from Mark Strong playing the Jordanian intelligence chief who is really the smartest guy in the room. He says up front to Roger that he has only one rule: “Never lie to me,” and based on that and Roger’s next actions, we sense he really is the wild card of the story (despite the fact that he has far too few scenes in the movie). And, while not exactly novel, it is through his character that the delivery of the film’s ideas that modern-day America should learn to rely more on international ties to accomplish its goals is most effective.

Body of Lies certainly has more of a mind than last year’s political thriller, The Kingdom, which literally blew up in our faces with a long, massive, confusing shootout in the end (though this one has a few violent thriller-style action scenes, to be sure). Mainstream Hollywood, however, still often seems to play it too safe and too loose in dealing with the current political climate (and a much more ambitious studio film like Steven Gaghan's Syriana that really solely tries to embrace the political intrigue and complexity is a true rarity). The result is a film that you say was somewhat interesting but then just kind of shrug off.