Living Labor by Joseph B. Entin

Author:Joseph B. Entin [Entin, Joseph B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020 LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2023-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

“There’s no border here”: Frozen River

Set in the north country of upstate New York and on the Akwesasne (Mohawk) Reservation that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border, Frozen River narrates the encounter and eventual partnership of two impoverished women: Ray Eddy, a white mother of two boys (TJ, age fifteen, and Ricky, age eight) who works part-time as a retail clerk at a discount store, and Lila Littlewolf, a Mohawk bingo parlor employee who is trying to regain custody of her infant son from her former mother-in-law. Ray and Lila meet when Lila appropriates a car that had been abandoned by Ray’s husband, a compulsive gambler who has abruptly left Ray and their sons, absconding with the money they had been saving to purchase a new double-wide mobile home. Desperate to make up the stolen money in time to purchase the new mobile home before Christmas, Ray teams up with Lila to transport undocumented immigrants from China and Pakistan into the United States by driving across the frozen St. Lawrence River through the Mohawk reservation. After a few successful runs, including one during which they accidentally abandon a baby in a duffle bag on the ice, only to the retrace their tracks and rescue her, Ray and Lila are finally followed by Canadian and New York State police, who wait on the edge of the reservation and demand that one of the traffickers turn herself in. Lila decides to give herself up, but then Ray, realizing that her racial privilege will ease her passage through the courts and prison, submits to arrest. Lila takes custody of her young son and moves in with Ray’s two sons to care for them until Ray is released.

Produced with a $1 million budget and released in 2008, Frozen River is the first feature-length film written and directed by Courtney Hunt, who lived for several years in the area where the film is set, researching the story. Page 103 →The film was lauded by many critics, including Roger Ebert, and was awarded several prizes, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It also received Academy Award nominations for best screenplay (Hunt) and best actress (Leo). Like Gran Torino, the film offers a meditation on interethnic, transnational working-class affiliation in the age of globalization. Yet Frozen River attends much more closely than Eastwood’s film to the details of economic desperation, underscoring the harsh poverty its characters are laboring to escape. In addition, Hunt’s film focuses on the particular challenges faced by working-class women in a capitalist system that is both patriarchal and settler colonialist. The film suggests that the economic, gender, and racial barriers to its protagonists’ well-being are substantial, but it holds out hope that transcultural solidarity between women can produce unorthodox forms of social relation and belonging capable of countering, or at least mitigating, contemporary neoliberal capitalism’s harsh logics of punitive abandonment and dispossession.

Thematically, Frozen River is a film about the possibilities of and trenchant obstacles to physical, social, and economic mobility in a globalizing world, especially for poor women and undocumented immigrants.

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