Frozen River (2008)

Hard living in the reservation, becomes even more ungiving against the bitter cold and frozen north. While this film succeeds in painting that lifeless landscape, the people are as unsympathetic toward each other as well. Ray is hard-edged as a 50 something white woman whose no-good gambling husband finally left for good, leaving her, a small child and an angry 15 year old teen. More than her match is Lila, who wore the same dour expression throughout the movie. No one seems to like each other. Ok I get that, life is hard on the reservation. But these people dont seem to be helping themselves either. The biggest complaint comes when Ray (Melissa Leo) is caught smuggling two chinese women, asks the cop, who was the most sympathetic voice in this whole ordeal, how long would she be locked up. "Four years", he says, "unless you are on a watch list". She was relieved. Only 4 years ? Thats easy money for taking a small risk - it should be 10 years and $100,000 fine. This is hardly a deterrent. The director and writer seem single-focused on just one thing. That to portray poverty and hopelessness. But hardly offers a solution.

The movie opens on a cold winter day—a few days before Christmas. We first see the face of a crying woman, Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), smoking a cigarette; her teeth are cigarette-stained and her faces is ruddy, almost malnourished. Ray is sitting on the front step of her single-wide trailer. One gets the impression that she is living from day to day. Ray is crying because her husband has just taken off with the all of the money that they had saved for a major payment on a double-wide trailer. He is a compulsive gambler and has taken off in one of their two old cars, leaving her and her two sons without any money. It soon becomes clear that this is not the first time he has done this and that neither she nor her 15-year-old son, T.J. (Charlie DcDermott), expects him to come back. Yet, she goes to the Bingo parlor in the nearby Mohawk reservation (between New York State and Quebec) to try to find him. With barely enough money to buy gas (and without the $5 entrance fee needed to get into the bingo place), she begs the woman taking the admission fee to let her go into the place to just look for her husband. She is not admitted. When she comes back to her car, she sees a young Indian woman, Lila (Misty Upham) driving off in her husband's car (which had been left abandoned with the keys in the seat).Ray follows Lila to her small trailer to get her car back. As Ray retrieves her car, Lila tells her that she has a friend who will pay $2,000 for it (more than it is worth---and without papers). Why? He is a smuggler who is always looking for cars with pop up trunks. Ray agrees to have Lila show her to the buyer, while showing Lila her gun and telling her that she is not afraid to use it if she has to. To get to the car dealer, they have to cross a wide frozen river (the St. Lawrence?—the St. Regis?) that divides the Mohawk reservation and serves as the border between Canada and the US. When they reach Lila's friend on the other side of the international border, he gives them $1,200 as two people are being into the trunk to be taken to the US. Thus begins the reluctant smuggling relationship between Ray and Lila with Lila supplying the contacts and Ray supplying the car with the pop trunk--as well as the fact that Ray is 'white' and police won't suspect her of smuggling across people the border. Lila and Ray make several smuggling 'runs,' with no two coming off the same. However, when the arrangement goes wrong, the consequences affect both women and families in an unexpected way. The story and characters are well-developed in this screenplay (written and directed by Courtney Hunt), and Melissa Leo's acting is well worth her Oscar nomination. Leo would eventually win an Oscar for her role in The Fighter (2011).

The river in question is the St Lawrence dividing the United States and Canada, more specifically a stretch between New York state and Quebec province where the Mohawk nation lives on both sides. This is not a corner of America that one normally views in film. People here are dirt poor, literally living from pay cheque to pay cheque and searching for a little money down the back of the sofa. Again this is not a vision of the USA that we see much on screen. Two single mothers - the white Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) and the Mohawk Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) - become unlikely allies in a struggle to provide for their kids in this unusual and moving tale both written and directed by Courtney Hunt. This is the kind of different work that perhaps would only come from a female independent film-maker.

You like Mohawks, white trailer trash but both with a big heart? What writing!!! What understated, realistic acting! the cinematography of some frozen river in Plattsburgh, NY in the polar cold of winter is outstanding. And you really feel it. Course we're in the Blizzard of 2010 right now in Boston so it fits right in.The casual use of a gun is unsettling but this heroine is not blessed with a Ph.D. in anything. She just loves her sons and has been deserted by her gambling-aholic husband. She is just trying to get by and uses the gun only for 'emphasis' Fascinating to see that larceny is featured throughout this movie, but is more mean and ugly when it is legal. The double-wide trailer salesman who casually takes her $3000, has her sign a paper and doesn't even give her a copy. YOu know she will never see that trailer, as he will have 'no proof' that she has given him this CASH. The mother-in-law of the Mohawk woman who steals her grandbaby from the hospital. "The tribal elders don't get involved in this." She is smuggling to get money for support of the child, which she leaves at night looking in the window at her baby. The lying duplicity of the Yankee Dollar manager who has stringing Ray along for 2 years, promising to bring her on full time.....all legal. No benefits, rotten pay.The movie benefits from the fact that they had no money, so the weather man is the actual weatherman in Plattsburg, NY. The trailer salesmen were afraid they would 'ruin their image'????? Yet this was the big dream of this woman, not something she was forced into living in.And who didn't get this Christmas time movie's metaphor of the immigrant baby, who they leave by the side of the ice because the car is too heavy. The immigrant parents are in the trunk so they don't know until they let them out at the motel. The Pakistani manager interprets, "Her baby was in that satchel." These smugglers drive all the way back onto the ice and find the baby 'frozen dead'. The baby-less Mohawk woman doesn't want to hold her to her warm body because 'the baby's dead', but does. By the time they get back to the motel, she reports, "The baby's moving." So they give a live baby back to the illegal immigrant who collapses with relief. Christ child, anyone? A unique movie, you won't forget it. Parts will come back to haunt you, like the chance the white woman has to escape back to her children, knowing the Mohawk will be expelled from the Mohawk nation if she and the immigrants are not turned over to the New York state police. She doesn't take it and decides to go to jail. Contrary to stereotype, the trooper tells her she will serve 4 months ("if you're not on the black list"). See it.