A new film focus on immigrants
Movies are shifting from the journey itself to the issues that crop up after arrival, exploring how the changes affect everyone, including members of the affected communities.
IN COURTNEY HUNT'S absorbing new feature film "Frozen River," an Upstate New York blue-collar mom decides to take a job in one of America's hottest growth industries: people smuggling.
Not that Ray (Melissa Leo) is very clued in about why so many illegal immigrants are risking their lives trying to slip into the United States or has much sympathy for their plight. Juggling a harried life that includes two kids, two jobs and an absentee gambler husband, Ray has enough problems of her own without worrying about the Chinese and Pakistani refugees she's shuttling in the trunk of her car across the Canadian border.
"If they want to come here so bad they should take the time to learn English," Ray blurts out at one point to her partner in malfeasance, Lila (Misty Upham), a wry Mohawk Indian laboring mightily herself to make ends meet.
What remains unsaid in this subtle, perceptive movie, is that Ray actually has more in common than she realizes with her desperate human cargo. Like them, she occupies one of American society's lower socio-economic rungs. But history and cultural conditioning have taught her to think of immigrants as aliens, sub-humans, the Other. The movie's power derives in large measure from Ray's belated recognition of a deeper, common humanity she shares with these exiles.
The representation in American movies of immigrants (and of two close relations, ethnicity and "race") is practically as old as the movies themselves, from "Birth of a Nation" and Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant" to "Crash" and "Under the Same Moon." Today, as mass immigration has evolved into a global phenomenon, a growing number of filmmakers in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as the United States are probing immigration's causes as well as its consequences for the lives of ordinary people.
Macro yet micro
SEVERAL more Hollywood movies slated to open this fall and winter will explore immigration themes, whether explicitly or covertly. They include "Towelhead," a drama directed by Alan Ball (an Oscar winner for the "American Beauty" screenplay), set during the Gulf War, about a 13-year-old Arab American girl sent to Houston to live with her authoritarian Lebanese father; and Wayne Kramer's "Crossing Over," a multi-story ensemble drama about immigrants of several nationalities trying to gain legal status in Los Angeles. The marquee cast includes Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd.
