Trouble the Water

You and Me, We Sweat and Strain

2008 // USA // Tia Lessin and Carl Deal // September 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have achieved a triumph in documentary film-making with Trouble the Water, a phenomenal, searing portrait of American survival and spirit. The directors deserve a bow for offering veterans such as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog stiff competition for the best documentary feature of 2008. However, the soul and vision of Trouble the Water's protagonist, one Kimberly Rivers Roberts, so suffuses—one might say possesses—the film, that any fair assessment must regard it as her film, at least in part. Indeed, Trouble the Water recalls Herzog's own Grizzly Man in its near-surrender of its form and content to the sizzling force of its fascinating subject. Admittedly, Lessin and Deal's stance towards Roberts is far warmer, more admiring, and more credulous than that of the German master towards Timothy Treadwell. There is a temptation to regard Trouble the Waters at least partly as "found art," given that Roberts' own amateur footage of the Lower Ninth Ward under Katrina's lash serves as the film's foundation. However, from this small seed springs a work so undeniably powerful that one can only praise the directors for revealing Trouble the Water's glittering treasures for all the world to see.

The film begins at a Red Cross shelter in September 2005, where Kimberly and Scott Roberts introduce themselves to the directors as New Orleans natives and survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Kim reveals, enthusiastically and with knowing showmanship, that she has roughly half an hour of rare, first-hand footage of the storm's devastation, captured on a handheld camcorder. Trouble the Water weaves Kim's astonishing, grainy glimpses of a drowning city with Lessin and Deal's own footage as they follow the Roberts' journey back to the Lower Ninth, then to relatives in Memphis, and then back again to New Orleans to try to rebuild their lives. The simplicity of the story is the film's appeal and also its grand illusion, for Trouble the Water deals with both the ugly reality of Katrina and the hopefulness that defies that reality. The indictment it presents is unambiguous: America's leaders left hundreds of thousands of poor citizens to die like Dark Age peasants in the face of a natural disaster. However, this scathing (yet persuasive) critique is not the heart of the film, but merely the starting point for Kim and Scott's tale of remarkable fortitude.

Kim is an inescapable presence in the film, perpetually behind the camera or in front of it. An aspiring hip-hop artist and a bit of a hustler, Kim serves as a tuning fork for Trouble the Water. She vibrates to her own pitch, and the film can only follow along and find the harmony. To say that the strength of the film lies in her authenticity—her blackness? femininity? poverty?—is woefully off the mark. It is obvious from the moment we meet her that the Kim is not a pristine anthropological specimen meant to embody the Big Easy's plight. She is shamelessly, joyously, fiercely involved in the film. At different points throughout Trouble the Water, she serves as an interviewer, interpreter, guide, narrator, journalist, performer, cinematographer, and counselor, not to mention a proxy for our own shame and frustrations.

I asked myself, "Where did they find this woman?" before I remembered that, no, she found them. Scrappy, graceful self-promoter that she is, Kim evinces a compelling appreciation for the drama of her own story even as it is unfolding, a drama that runs deeper than mere gaping at disaster. She wanders through her neighborhood prior to landfall and interrogates friends and strangers about their plans for riding out the storm. She breathlessly repeats the date and that dread name—"Katrina"—well before the extent of the hurricane's calamitous reach is apparent, as if she knows that the storm will be talked about for generations to come. She speaks earnestly and awestruck about the strength of her community and how hardships bring people together. She sculpts the sorrows of New Orleans into her own life story, rapping to the camera over a track about her unlikely survival and boundless strength.

Rippling through Trouble the Water is the seductive and emotionally overwhelming notion that Kimberly Roberts is the quintessential face of twenty-first century America. Here is a woman who is powerful, courageous, scarred, dauntless, spiritual, sentimental, media-savvy, and self-aware. She is a woman longing to simultaneously start over and find her way home. This, not Trouble the Water's peppering of justifiable liberal rage, is what makes it so engaging. Which isn't to say the the film's gestures towards the indignant polemic sub-genre are ineffective. Lessin has served as a producer for a sizable slice of Michael Moore's output, but his influence is only apparent in the film's bemused, profoundly bitter awareness of the apathy infecting America's ruling class. In contrast to Moore's winking camera-hunger, here the directors only rarely intrude on Trouble the Water in any overt manner.

Lessin and Deal largely permit Kim and Scott to tell their tale, resisting the urge to editorialize or file down the serrated edges of their protagonists. The directors coax out the couple's complexity—a fabulous, human complexity, absent any sort of haughty exceptionalism—so smoothly, with such alert eyes and ears, that it seems effortless. (The bits of ironic news footage spliced in here and there suggest a clumsier hand.) Indeed, while the narrative thrust is unmistakably Kim's, Lessin and Deal leave their mark on the film, often in the way they cunningly convey revealing details. The cherubic Scott carries a deep scar on his left cheek, and I idly wondered: Would its origin ever be explained? Then, near the film's conclusion, Kim explains her husband's wound in her own way, dropping an oblique line into one of her songs that sheds fresh light on the couple's relationship. That moment, and the confessional character to it, is Kim's, but its placement in the film is a testament to Lessin and Deal's marvelous storytelling instincts.

Rarely do socially conscious documentaries about recent events rise above the shackles of outrage, and rarely do they have a purpose beyond motivating already sympathetic viewers to political action. Trouble the Water will persist, I believe, as a work of documentary art that transcends its proximal subject matter. It stands as an essential primary and secondary source in the history of American life, and also as an affecting glimpse of human resilience, one that is both uncommonly noble and strangely familiar. Kim and Scott, despite all the mistakes and tribulations in their lives, represent what we aspire to be, the kind of people we were always told America was made of: the people who start swimming when the waters start rising.

I Served the King of England

Service With Distraction

2006 // Czech Republic - Slovakia // Jirí Menzel // September 23, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Jirí Menzel's I Served the King of England boasts an undeniably mischievous, gloriously giddy tone. Flashes of the grotesque and wearisome melodrama lurk in its corners, but on the whole it is a winsome film, and eagerly so. Its genre-tripping acrobatic feats—twists and twirls of fable, slapstick, satire, tragedy, and World War II epic—certainly set it apart from any other film I've seen this year. What elevates Served above an amusing novelty for its own sake is Menzel's ambition to craft both an engaging character study of lingering adolescence and a penetrating allegory about twentieth-century Europe (and you don't need to be a critic or a historian to discern how these are related.) This ambition lurks just beneath the film's pleasurable, often schizophrenic surface, defying the instinct to dismiss Served as a quirky diversion. To be sure, the film holds shortcomings that cannot be dismissed, particularly the trite, manipulative turns in the story and some woefully dull patches in a work otherwise so filled with motion and delight. However, these are small potatoes alongside the film's sensual joys, its unexpected thoughtfulness, and the lead performance by Ivan Barnev, who guides us on a rapturous and insightful comic journey.

Served begins with the release of diminutive Jan Díte (Oldrich Kaiser) from a Communist prison in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Paroled to build gravel roads in the Bohemian wilds, Jan reminisces about the meandering path his life has taken, in between pining for the young, flirtatious Marcela (Zuzana Fialová), another ex-convict released to work for the state. In flashback, we witness Jan's life spent serving at the feet of the wealthy, as well as his unquenchable passion to one day be a millionaire himself. In the pubs, brothels, and four-star hotels of 1920s and 30s Prague, a young Jan (Barnev) waits on the Czech elite, always walking a tightrope between ambition and monkey business. Crisp perfection establishes his reputation, but it is his impish character that wins him friends and allies. He is fascinated by the power that money has over people, and he marvels at the childlike happiness of the supremely wealthy. He tosses handfuls of coins to watch Czech tycoons scramble for them, and, following the example of genial meat-slicer salesman Mr. Walden (Marián Labuda), he meticulously lays out his paper currency and basks in it. Women hold a comparable wonder for Jan, and he pursues them with zeal and adoration.

Jan is not so much swept along by history as he deftly rides it like a keen-eyed surfer, always on the lookout for trouble and openings. The rise of National Socialism complicates his endeavors, as his fellow Czechs shun and scorn the ethnic Germans in their midst. This includes Líza (Julia Jentsch), a Rhineland beauty as deficient in stature as Jan. Despite her disturbing fetishism for der Fuehrer, something about her undisguised devotion to Jan—as a partner, rather than an object of pity or sport—sparks real love in the little waiter. Then the march of the Nazi war machine turns the tables in Prague, and the Czechs are suddenly second-class citizens. Jan attempts the delicate waltz expected of pliant Slavic subjects of the Reich, all the while working towards his dreamy future as a wealthy hotelier.

Menzel leaps back and forth between these flashbacks and Jan's reflections in the gray post-war present, a time enlivened only by the prospects of an erotic tumble with Marcela. In theory, the use of these twin storylines makes sense, structurally speaking, but Menzel loses his way somewhat in the latter-day sequences, getting bogged down in rambling musings and alleged tensions far less intriguing than those of Jan's past adventures. Still, Kaiser's handsome Czech countenance and the combined mirth and sadness in his eyes command our attention, while the dreary, almost medieval quality to Communist Czechoslovakia serves its purpose in contrasting with the glittering opulence of the pre-war era. In truth, Menzel positively revels in the decadence of a vanished Prague, luxuriating in its food, drink, women, and aristocratic excess. At times, Served takes on the surreal, tableau qualities of a Gilliam feature, as when Jan serves milk to a gaggle of nude Teutonic beauties at a Reich "breeding facility," or when pudgy Czech diplomats dance is ecstasy while dining on roasted camel.

There is a cartoonish quality to the characters that populate Served, and especially to Jan himself, that lends them a vividness and also an unfortunate distance. The film's preference for caricature over authentic characterization curtails the possibilities for empathy and for a sense of true peril. When events turn tragic, the effect is ultimately coercive or even outright cheap. Fortunately, Menzel finds ways to charm us with his players and convey the striking qualities of their various social plights. Barnev in particular holds much of the film's weight on his slim shoulders, discovering Jan's inner tribulations with clarity and affection. A curious hobgoblin winding his way through an epoch of possibility and ruin, Jan nurtures his obsessions, even as the tumultuous events around him reveal flashes of his hidden compassion, vulnerability, and bitterness. Gleeful and grasping, Jan is easily dazzled and not above blockhead risks. He is painfully aware of his place in the order of things, but also oddly oblivious to the more abstract motives of others. Rarely has the phrase "man-child" seemed more appropriate.

Menzel also gracefully conveys a symbolic dimension to Jan's character, one reflective of a forgotten stripe of twentieth century European life. Not so much opportunistic as naive and diligent, Jane rides out the blackest years of human history on fortitude, canniness, and sheer luck. Despite the stigma of Nazism in Prague during the early years of the war, he aligns himself with its trappings out of affection for Líza. Under occupation, he reaps the benefits of this early loyalty, but he doesn't seem pleased or ashamed with himself, just bewildered. For all of Served's cartoon silliness, the director exhibits little patience for Good Guy / Bad Guy dualities. Nearly every character that Jan stumbles across reveals a capacity for both brutality and gentleness, honor and cravenness, vanity and selflessness. Menzel's achievement lies in the way that this ambiguity never seems contrived. Through a lens of comic book folly, he shows us that ambiguity is always there, the ugly secret of a history too often writ as stark morality play. Most pointedly, Served suggests that time is rarely kind to either aspirants or survivors in the end, and that escaping with one's skin is often the best that one can hope for in a world battered by shifting and violent ideologies.

Burn After Reading

Intelligence Failures

2008 // USA - UK - France // Ethan and Joel Coen // September 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Ethan and Joel Coen are likely the most self-consciously clever of American auteurs, although rarely insufferably so, and certainly the most disposed to genre-hopping. Given that No Country For Old Men was last year's unqualified triumph in English-language cinema, it's perhaps inevitable then that their next feature would prove to be a lesser film, if only by deliberate design. "Give us an Oscar will you, Hollywood Establishment? This'll show 'em." That's not to say that Burn After Reading is a bad film, or even a mediocre one. It is pure Coen, and therefore a rich cinematic meal to savor and absorb, rife with cartoon heartbreak and bleak absurdism. It also may be the darkest, cruelest film the brothers have ever made, and considering that they gave us Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn't There, that's saying something. Contra the film's promotion, Burn After Reading is not, strictly speaking, a satire of the spy thriller genre. There are spies in it, sure, but the film is essentially a tragic farce about how venal, deceitful, and just plain stupid humanity can be. It therefore may not qualify as everyone's idea of "entertainment."

The plot is labyrinthine, but it hinges on a CD-ROM containing "secret shit," as personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) succinctly puts it. The CD has turned up on the locker room floor of Hardbodies, a D.C. gym where the enthusiastic Chad and glum co-worker Linda (Frances McDormand) are employed under anxious manager Ted (Richard Jenkins). The mysterious disc appears to contain classified U.S. intelligence files, and Pitt and McDormand mull over ways to turn this discovery to their financial advantage. Specifically, McDormand is thinking of the cosmetic surgery that she has been coveting, surgery not covered by her health plan. ("I've taken this body as far as I can!" she laments.) The pair track down the apparent owner of the disc, a tense, alcoholic, foul-mouthed CIA analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), but their negotiations end badly. Who else would want to buy secret intelligence shit? The Russians, of course! Clearly, Pitt and McDormand are not only greedy, but woefully behind the times in terms of their geopolitical awareness.

It turns out that Malkovich has recently resigned from the CIA rather than accept a demotion, and he is laboring on a vengeful memoir about his years in the U.S. intelligence service. He is married to a pediatrician, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who just might be the coldest, most waspish person ever to choose a profession dealing with children. Swinton is having an affair with neurotic Treasury Department agent Harry (George Clooney), while quietly meeting with lawyers to initiate divorce proceedings against her husband. In addition to his regular flings with Swinton, Clooney routinely steps out on his wife with women he meets on the Internet. It's worth pointing out here that Harry is probably the most gleefully repulsive role that Clooney has ever played: a vain, waffling, sex-addicted, paranoid, compulsive liar. Clooney meets McDormand through a dating service, which closes the loop on the character flowchart, and sets up this tangle of relationships to tighten around everyone in a cascade of coincidences, stupid decisions, and tragic mistakes.

While all the performers do a fine job, most of them--McDormand, Malkovich, Swinton, Jenkins--are essentially playing their standard role. That is, if you enjoy watching McDormand doing that thing that she does, you'll appreciate her in Burn. Admittedly and a little unexpectedly, Malkovich is a welcome addition, as his distracted, theatrical style adds some refreshing rattle to the standard clockwork hum of the Coen script. However, the truly pleasurable performances belong to Pitt and Clooney. Pitt exhibits astonishing comedic chops in a character that is a bit off the beaten path for him: a hopelessly uncool and witless dope, completely unaware of his own limits. Some of the most ludicrously funny moments in Burn involve Pitt's baffling attempts to approximate an espionage tough, by narrowing his eyes and affecting a guttural growl. Clooney, meanwhile, has a less amusing role, but one that's a more substantial depature. Not only is Clooney thoroughly unlikeable in Burn, but he exploits his normal charismatic currency—his swagger and ten-grand smile—to convey a sense of creepy phoniness. Eventually, when he breaks down into wild-eyed paranoid hysterics by the film's end, Clooney pulls off an elegant trick, coaxing us to both fear him and fear for him.

Burn After Reading features a host of morally bankrupt characters, but it's not a morally bankrupt film. Granted, it doesn't really seem to have an ethos, in the way that one expects of most art films, even black comedies. Its aim is simply to shine a glaring light on the essential stupidity of humankind. It's tempting to deride the Coens for selecting this softest of targets for their morbid wit. However, they savage humanity's plight without the vengeful tone of most satire, and with such mirthful abandon that the film comes off as flabbergasted and bemused rather than scolding. It's no coincidence that Burn opens with a long zoom from high orbit above the Earth to the halls of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Mimicking the eye of a spy satellite—the God the Father of the post-faith twenty-first century, tallying our sins from its heavenly vantage point—this shot hints that we should see the events of the film from a deity's chilly distance. We are free to laugh or weep, as warranted, at the idiocy of its characters.

Given this removed quality to its approach, Burn may not be the sort of comedy that will satisfy viewers looking for an escapist chuckle. It's outrageously funny, but it's ugly funny: relationships disintegrate, careers crumble, and at least two people die brutally. Even devoted Coen fans may be uneasy laughing at such things. This is particularly the case given that Burn, unlike the directors' other comedies, doesn't offer much in the way of redemption or a moral. What's troublesome is the sense of puffed philosophical pandering at work in Burn, one that's too sweeping and definitive to sit comfortably with the brothers' usual taste for ambiguity. That people are stupid and life can be a sick joke are hardly original sentiments, and it's not clear why the Coens deserve credit for advancing them. Regardless of the coarseness of its aims, however, Burn After Reading is utterly, sickly funny, in a way that sets it apart from... well, every other film not directed by the Coens, I suppose.

Tropic Thunder

I Don't See Any Method At All

2008 // USA - Germany // Ben Stiller // September 12, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Hollywood is a tempting target for satire. The angles of attack are multitude: the self-importance, the artificiality, the artlessness, the clueless insularity, the inhuman ruthlessness. Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder tackles them all. It pounces with slavering gusto on every opportunity for vicious mockery, strafing Tinseltown with both barrels. It's definitely funny, but not the sort of comedy that had me laughing beginning to end. Instead it inspired a state of disbelief, gaping amusement, and squirming embarrassment. In its best moments, Thunder calls to mind the lunatic highs of Mel Brook's oeuvre. That said, the film is far too conventional in some respects, and too sublimely bizarre in others to be mistaken for any kind of comic masterwork. Yet despite some misfires in the performances and script, the sheer chutzpah of the enterprise and Stiller's unexpected flashes of comic madness render it a thing to behold. Neither mercy nor tact are in its arsenal, and thank God for that.

Stiller and co-writers Justin "This Is the Girl" Theroux and Etan Cohen open Tropic Thunder with an inspired and cunning sequence, using commercials and trailers to introduce the main characters. Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a hip-hop artist who has made a fortune peddling his own brand of energy drinks and bars. Lowbrow physical comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is starring in a sequel to his flatulence-rich gross-out hit, The Fatties. Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an award-showered Aussie Method actor appearing in a prestige drama about homosexual priests. And finally Tugg Speedman (a well-muscled and -oiled Stiller) is launching the latest sequel in his apocalyptic action franchise, Scorcher VI.

These fake ads set the refreshingly original tone for the rest of the film. Thunder doesn't occupy itself with wisecracks or dry observations. Rather, it replicates the ludicrous qualities of the real world and adds half a twist of bonus stupidity. We're prompted to loathe the characters of Thunder based solely on small glimpses of their output. However, the ads are also aimed squarely at the audience's own pop cultural preferences. The satire doesn't truly sting unless you've paid good money to see similar garbage. It's a risky tactic; no one likes to be called an idiot, even by implication. Stiller keeps us on his side by conveying a sense of shared misery. The director, after all, has produced his share of crap, as have his performers. In keeping with Thunder's Vietnam War film-within-the-film, Stiller establishes a bitter camaraderie with his audience, capped with a sheepish grin: "Can you believe we made it through nightmares like If Lucy Fell and Mystery Men?"

Thunder's plot is the stuff of numerous screwball comedies-of-error, albeit ratcheted up with admirably realized corporate movie-making freneticism and dollops of pure weirdness. The aforementioned film-within-the-film, also titled Tropic Thunder, is a Very Serious War Picture. Shooting on location in Vietnam, the production is rapidly spiraling out of control. Over budget and behind schedule, novice director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is out of his league juggling his stars' inflated egos and demands. Black is a barely controllable heroin addict. Stiller is trying to leap out of his action flick rut, having failed with a disastrous bit of Oscar-bait titled Simple Jack. (His mistake? Like Sean Penn in I Am Sam, he went "full retard.") Downey has medically darkened his skin to play the film's black sergeant, much to Jackson's consternation, and refuses to break character at any time. Hovering over Coogan's shoulder via satellite is monstrous producer Les Grossman (a hirsute, balding Tom Cruise), who breathes in air and exhales venomous insults and violent threats.

Lurking around the set is Four-Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte, grizzled and hook-handed), whose war memoir, also titled Tropic Thunder, serves as the basis for the film. Nolte recommends that Coogan break the actors out of their comfort zones by putting them "in the shit," as the vets say. The director eagerly pursues this notion, dropping his pampered cast in the jungle and resolving to shoot the rest of the film "guerrilla style" with minimal crew. Things go off the rails almost instantly, with Stiller and his fellow actors blundering into the clutches of opium growers. Suffice to say that the story functions mostly to establish that Stiller and company are complete fools, although—since this isn't completely pitch black comedy—their foolishness arguably saves them by the end.

Tropic Thunder isn't particularly funny or insightful when it relies on one-note gags or hackneyed reversals of expectations. You know the drill. The devoted Method thespian is in the throes of an identity crisis. The hip-hop star with the ultra-heterosexual partier persona is actually a sensitive gay wannabe actor. You can practically hear Stiller and Theroux tittering: We can gets some gags out of that, right? For all of Stiller's enviable precision when he aims at the institutional absurdities of Hollywood, there are still some unfortunate miscalculations. Cruise's producer is exquisitely malevolent, and he chews on the vulgarity with roaring relish. (I could have listened to him berate his underlings all night.) Yet Stiller seems to think that a puffy Cruise dancing to hip-hop is hilarious, when in reality it's just odd. The worst offender is Black, who is sadly miscast and grating. His manic "Cuckoo for Smack" routine lacks the wounded adolescent strut that made The School of Rock and Kung Fu Panda such delights, and all that's left is a bug-eyed caricature of addiction.

When Tropic Thunder succeeds, however, it succeeds marvelously. Satirizing the film industry is its primary mission, and in this it is absolutely savage. No one escapes its wrath: actors, directors, producers, writers, agents, or assistants. Even the pyrotechnics technician is portrayed as a clown. Most importantly, Stiller gets both the broad strokes and the details exactly right. Consider the portrayal of Stiller's agent, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey). There's the slick, unimaginative nicknames he spouts ("Tuggster!"); the way he proudly relishes his client's panda-rescue charity ad in Vanity Fair (back cover!); the fact that he plays Wii Tennis while talking on his Bluetooth headset, for Chrissake. It's ludicrous, but also creepily plausible. Thunder exhibits the sort of meticulous, dead-on writing and production design that betrays both an affection and a burning hatred for Hollywood.

Thunder also features glimmers of unexpected goofiness that borders on inspired lunacy. Indeed, it's the little things from this film that stick with me and bring a smile to my face, and most of these moments involve Stiller. I've never had any particular affection for him as a comedic actor, and here he spends too much screen time mired in a fruitless, Martin Sheen send-up. Yet I can't deny the dabs of crackpot strangeness that he adds to the film. Lost in the jungle with only his video iPod, he raptly watches Captain Kirk tussle with a rubber-suited alien. A lesser comedy would have harped on his affection for Star Trek in the script; instead Stiller slides in this revealing character detail via a sight gag. There's the shock and then hilarious horror when an animal attack has an unthinkable outcome. There's the wide-eyed way he murmurs the line, "You've got the VHS?" And there's the utterly demented sight of a baby repeatedly stabbing Stiller in the back with a knife. The moment is a personal favorite from the film, one that illustrates just how wonderfully nasty and unexpected Tropic Thunder can be. Consider yourself advised, soldier.

Frozen River

Northeast Passage

2008 // USA // Courtney Hunt // September 2, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Frozen River is a tale of dreams, or at least what passes for dreams in the bitter winters of far-upstate New York. The film presents us with two women, each a quintessential American survivor in their way. Ray (Melissa Leo) is a white, middle-aged single mom, scraping together a life for her two boys in a cramped manufactured home. Lila (Misty Upham) is a younger Mohawk woman, and also a mother, although her infant son has been wrested from her with the tacit consent of her tribe. When fate brings these two women together, their antagonism seethes, but eventually they embark on a perilous criminal collaboration. First-time director Courtney Hunt's naturalistic story of slush-and-mud desperation on the margins of the American dream is an affecting and uncommonly sensitive depiction of foolish risks taken for all the right reasons.

When Frozen River opens, Ray's husband has recently vanished with the funds that were supposed to secure their new double-wide. Eventually we learn that he is a gambling addict who has pulled such disappearing acts before. This might be the final act. Ray repeatedly checks her phone messages in search of some sign from him. The absent man of the house is often the subject of arguments between Ray and her teenage son T.J. (Charlie McDermott), their quarrels masking a shared understanding that he was a lousy husband and father. With Ray's job in a sad little retail store as the only source of income, the family is teetering on the edge of poverty. The dream of the double-wide is evaporating, the repo men are coming for the television, and meals before paydays consist of popcorn and Tang.

Ray eventually finds her husband's car; the husband is gone, but Lila is behind the wheel. The Mohawk woman is reticent, unwilling to explain herself: "I found it," she shrugs, "The keys were in it." A widow who works in the tribe's dingy bingo parlor, Lila has bad eyesight, a freezing little trailer—Ray's house is extravagant by comparison—and a son who seems to have been kidnapped by her mother-in-law. ("Tribal police don't get involved in that stuff," she explains.) She is also an aspiring smuggler of human cargo: Asian immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. from Canada. The Mohawk reservation straddles the border, rendering it an ideal conduit for trafficking when the river freezes. Unfortunately, Lila lacks a car with a spacious trunk, as well as the skin color that would permit her to pass the state troopers unmolested. As it happens, Ray needs cash for a down payment on the new house, a tantalizing prize that represents a better life for her family. The two work out an arrangement; Ray provides the transportation, Lila the connection. From the beginning, however it's an alliance fraught with tension and calamity. More than that I won't say.

Frozen River possesses a suffocating realism, a sensation partly established by its dismal landscape of white snow, slate sky, and rusting metal. Mostly, however, it emerges from Hunt's deep adoration for Leo and Upham's faces, which she frequently shoots in tight close-ups. Leo's outstanding performance resides deep in her eyes, lined with crow's feet and dollar-store mascara. They glint with the same contradictory hues that were in evidence in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: despair, warmth, exhaustion, bitterness, and strutting decisiveness. It's such an authentic performance, it almost feel voyeuristic to watch her doing mundane things like preparing for work or broodingly smoking a cigarette.

Upham's smooth, cherubic face is more inscrutable, but her eyes have a squinting moistness that hints at her painful past and frayed sense of self. She doesn't make excuses for her misdeeds, and yet she seems acutely aware of how shabby and sad her life must seem. Many in the tribe treat her with contempt, as though she were some sort of untouchable, and not merely because her illicit side business is an open secret. (A native used car dealer refuses to sell her a vehicle with a trunk; he knows what use she has for it.) There seems to be ugly history there that is never revealed. Lila appears prepared to turn her back on the reservation, but her son keeps her there. She watches him from a distance and sneaks him money in potato chip cans.

Both Lila and Ray exhibit different kinds of defiance: the native woman a quiet apathy and intensely lonely longing; the white woman a scrabbling desperation and sarcastic tongue. Both of these people flare to life when out on smuggling runs. They become bolder and tougher, crackling with wariness. Both are in denial about what they are up to. Ray insists that she is "no criminal." Lila declares that their little enterprise isn't a crime at all, just "free trade between free people." And we believe them, in a way. Smuggling isn't a lifestyle or a thrill for these women, but a means to realize their dreams, no matter how small or simple they might seem to an outsider.

Implausibilities are scattered through Frozen River, mostly in the form of character reversals that don't ring quite true. While the film boasts an icy, anguished sense of lurking doom, it also suffers from a kind of lazy tidiness. Ray emphatically warns T.J. not to tinker with a propane torch, so of course he disobeys—for all the right reasons—and ignites a near-catastrophe. Of course the state trooper that sets Ray on edge at the store turns up later to question her, and of course this is the same trooper that pursues her during a botched smuggling run. Hunt's tone suggests that something momentous, even disastrous, will happen before the credits roll, but her storytelling style leaves little doubt that all will be resolved, one way or another. The suspicious smoothness in its narrative cogs notwithstanding, Frozen River's conclusion is touched with grace and fragile promise. The film's final scene involves a carousel, a family, and a glimmer of hope. Or at least what passes for such things in America.

Transsiberian

They Caught a Bad, Bad Train

2008 // UK - Germany - Spain - Lithuania // Brad Anderson // August 31, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Allow me to clear up one thing that the marketing of Transsiberian has unforgivably muddled: Woody Harrelson might have first billing, but Emily Mortimer is the clear protagonist and the star of this serviceable—albeit raw-nerved—thriller. Director Brad Anderson begins with a meaty premise: two guileless Americans find themselves enmeshed in a heroin trafficking plot during their journey aboard the titular train. This is not a Locked Room mystery in the tradition of Murder of the Orient Express. Jessie (Mortimer) and Roy (Harrelson) spend as much time off the train as on it, and the film clearly owes a debt to Hitchcock's more harried, dashing thrillers in its action set pieces and its fascination with Jessie's responses to desperate, often uncanny, circumstances. Unfortunately, Anderson lends barely any thematic heft to the tale. While Jessie's plight often has us sweating bullets in the moment, Transsiberian's themes are confused, when the film-makers bother to articulate them at all. The result is a film that offers excitement and opportunities for "What Would You Do?" speculation, but little else.

In a era when thrillers so often rely on characters that are not what they seem, Transsiberian is bracingly straightforward in setting up its conflicts and twists. If you've seen the trailer, you already know the nickel version. Roy and Jessie are making an adventure of their return from a missionary trip in China by taking a train to Moscow. Roy is a good-natured but clueless schmuck, a variation on the bartender that established Harrelson's career, only without the sheepish humor. Jessie is the anxious dreamer, but with a wild past and a schizophrenic demeanor that permits Mortimer--who was all rural Minnesota sweetness in Lars and the Real Girl--to play against type a little. Sharing the couple's sleeping car is a pair far more acclimated to the perils of third-class world travel. Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) is a smooth Spanish bullshitter with an unseemly eye for Jessie, while Abby (Kate Mara) is an American girl from the wrong side of the tracks, all heavy eyeliner and furtive glances. The wild card is Grinko (Ben Kingsley), a dour Russian narcotics officer who is both maddeningly cunning and blatantly corrupt.

The plot is Transsiberian's raison d'être, so I won't say much more about it. There are harrowing acts of violence, a suitcase full of heroin that doesn't look like heroin, and lots and lots of deception and track-covering, particularly on Mortimer's part. Anderson's story and construction aren't stunningly original, but neither are they distractingly clichéd. The film borrows snippets from familiar thriller scenarios, cobbling them together into an contraption engineered to evoke cold-sweat tension. Guilt and suspicion are the currency of the script by Anderson and Will Conroy, and also the cornerstones of the film's most effective scenes. One of the more chilling moments involves a character browsing through pictures on a digital camera, where one particular image lurks like a tell-tale heart.

Harrelson is utterly and deliberately off-putting as Roy, an aw-shucks dimwit whose determination to do the right thing doesn't mitigate his jerk streak or his obliviousness to his spouse. (More than once, Mortimer pops in, panting and tearful, and Harrelson wonders, "Is something wrong?") Harrelson is actually a comfortable fit for the character, and does a passable job with the portrayal. However, the film has no use for him other than as ballast and to provide manly decisiveness at a couple of key moments. (Sexism much?) It's Mortimer's burden to hold our attention, and that she does quite well. She presents Jessie as a woman mired in a furrowed adolescent aimlessness after years of risky living. Her actions seem a little bewildering at times, but they're ultimately reconcilable with her twinned personality, part reckless ferocity and part impotent despair. The duller examples of the thriller genre depend on characters that behave in a relentlessly stupid manner. In contrast, Transsiberian's events tighten with exhausting tension around Mortimer due to to a couple of stupid mistakes. No honest person would deny suffering similar (or worse) lapses in judgment. Kingsley's Detective Grinko echoes the sly, relentless qualities of an older stripe of American gumshoe, even as he embodies a distinct post-Soviet gangster-cop archetype. It's a performance delivered from a hammy, eminently watchable stance, which serves Transsiberian's need for a menacing villain nicely.

Which brings us to the film's primary flaw: the sheer functionality of the whole enterprise. The film is exactly what it appears to be, no more, no less. Dark, violent, and ultimately forgettable, it's the stuff of enjoyable entertainment, but not necessarily stirring cinema. That's not to say that Transsiberian feels tossed-off, at least as a thriller. Its hunger for squirming viewers is palpable, and Anderson realizes the genre's components with a enviable skill and ruthlessness. In contrast, the director tends to lose his way when he gestures hazily towards themes such as the persistence of personal demons and the limits of compassion. These currents are presented with a kind of dreary half-heartedness. Furthermore, there's a muddled quality to the film's moral conception of Jessie: Is her subsumed assertiveness responsible for her plight, or is it the only thing that saves her hash? With one hand Anderson despairs over the unforeseen costs of deception, and with the other he promotes the virtues of noble lies. Transsiberian would have been better if it eschewed the awkward, mushy moral lessons and maintained a sharp focus on its principal strength. Namely, its visceral portrayal of a woman's grueling crawl through a waking nightmare.