A list of the most Canadian movies ever made by Americans would of course include Slapshot and Fargo, but it also should include Frozen River, an amazing 2008 movie by Courtney Hunt which I recently saw. How this beautiful film managed to stay under the radar despite two Oscar nominations is a mystery. Is it the bleakness of the setting, in and around the Indian reservation that straddles the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall in darkest winter? Is it because nobody knows anything about Hunt, who also wrote the movie? Is it because it was by and about women and doesn't have any car crashes... well, not exactly? I don't know, but it's worth watching just for Melissa Leo's performance as a mother of two who works in a dollar store and dreams of a double-wide mobile home. After seeing her all glammed up at the Oscars this year, it was shocking to see Leo's face, tired and haggard and unadorned with makeup and swollen from tears and so bloody emotionally expressive. And she's not the only remarkable thing about the movie: there's also great acting by Misty Upham as a young Mohawk woman who smuggles people across the river and Charlie McDermott as Leo's teenaged son. But it's Melissa Leo's face that stays in my head.
