Frozen River REVIEW
The following excerpt is from a short wikipedia biography of Florence
Owens Thompson, mother of seven children in 1936 (ten eventually) and to many
people, the face of the great Depression.
“In March 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Florence Owens Thompson and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville, California "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-picker's camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there – as many as 2,500 to 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Florence would relate in an interview years later, that when she cooked food for her children that day, little children appeared from the pea picker's camp asking, "Can I have a bite?”
While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of Thompson's sons took the radiator, which had also been damaged, to town for repair. Thompson and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As Thompson waited, Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. Over 10 minutes she took 6 images.
While Thompson's identity was not known for over forty years after the photos were taken, the images became famous. The sixth image especially, which later became known as Migrant Mother, "has achieved near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in [United States] history." Roy Stryker called Migrant Mother the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era.
In an interview with CNN, Thompson's daughter, Katherine McIntosh, recalled how her mother was a "very strong lady", and "the backbone of our family". She said that "We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something. She didn't eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate. That's one thing she did do."
The film, Frozen River is something of a retelling of an old story; A story of two mothers trying to care for their families in the deep despair of economic crisis. It is a story of a family being shoved off the cliff of the lower middle class into the bleak world of the lumpenproletariate in the stygian mist below it. It is a story of a woman who wants to work full time and provide for her family but who finds herself on the receiving end of corporate slavery at the “Yankee Dollar” where she has worked part-time, promised full time employment, for two years.
All it takes is a family catastrophe, in this case inflicted by a father’s gambling addiction, to send them over the edge into starvation or criminality or an unnecessary house fire.
For the shareholders of Yankee Dollar, it is another day of profits no doubt. But as the story unfolds, we see just how public and corporate policy eventually paves the way into one family’s disaster and a compromised national security.
Ray Eddy is a struggling mother trying to deal with the responsibility of two children after her husband has absconded with their family savings to gamble. In tracking down her husband’s stolen car, she comes into contact with Lila Littlewolf, a Mohawk Indian smuggler living in a camper, struggling to support a one year old child she is no longer allowed to see. Over the course of the next few days, we see the desperation of Ray’s situation driving her, first as an unwilling accomplice, then as a reluctant accomplice, then as a guilty but willing accomplice, and finally, as an assertive and enterprising accomplice to crime.
This is about life on the ragged edge of survival where inevitably, people grow tougher, meaner, and less punctilious about the law; where they surrender legality in the hopes of retaining dignity and humanity. Ray and Lilly smuggle some Chinese men over the frozen river into the U.S. for $1200. They return for more business and find themselves smuggling potential terrorists (a Pakistani family). A third trip winds up bringing them into an even seedier world of what looks to be some form of sex-slavery. They shoot people and are shot at. Ray’s pathetic little trailer is almost burned to the ground by her teenage son trying to thaw the pipes. She risks driving her car into the freezing waters of the St. Lawrence and winds up spending four months in jail. One senses her clinging with white knuckles to respectability and decency but the hardships of her situation, her desire to protect her children from the ramifications of those hardships, involve compromises.
What is this movie about? In my opinion, it is about the travesty of corporate policies that exploit people’s labor, driving them into wage-slavery, and eventually into crime. A society cannot pay the care-givers of children so little that those children are left eating pop-corn and Tang and expect that such people will not, at some point in time, break through the frayed edges of civil behavior to try and save their children from starvation. At this point, public economic policy (the free market allows companies like Yankee Dollar to hire people at an unlivable wage) is at odds with law enforcement policy and we begin creating the criminals that we must pay to defend against and prosecute.
All over the country today there are people like Ray Eddy and Lilly who see themselves dropping over the edge of sustainable life. More and more, people in the middle class that used to support these people with their philanthropy are unable to do so and support their own families.
I suspect that we all see it happening.
Question for Comment: What do you think about “Livable Wage” laws? Should people like Ray and Lily simply suffer from the decisions they have made in life (marrying poorly or not marrying at all for example)? Should they simply move? Look for better employment?
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