Frozen River

USA, 2008. Directed by Courtney Hunt. Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Michael O’Keefe, James Reilly, Mark Boone Junior.

An exceptional movie from first-time director Courtney Hunt. Set in the North Country of Upstate New York near the Mohawk Reservation and the Canadian border in the days before Christmas, Frozen River tells the story of two women who meet by chance and team up to smuggle illegal immigrants from Canada to the USA for $1,200 a time. This involves them taking hazardous trips across the frozen St Lawrence River and negotiating with dangerous crooks. Both are struggling financially: Ray (Leo) has been abandoned by her gambler husband, who has taken their savings and deposit for a new mobile home with him. She has a dead-end job and two children, the oldest of which, TJ (McDermott), is fifteen and painfully aware of the stark reality of their situation. His mother rejects all his demands to drop out of school so he can earn the family a living. The other woman is Lila (Upham), a widowed Mohawk whose husband died on a smuggling trip and whose infant son has been subsequently taken from her by her mother-in-law. The film is shot in a naturalistic style and Hunt has resisted the temptation to turn this into the thriller it so easily could have been. It is this lack of mainstream-style thrills that makes the film so powerful. There is a very strong sense of real life going on here and real life at the bottom of the pile at that. But even at the bottom there’s a pecking order – Lila confidently tells Ray she won’t get stopped “because you’re white”, while at the same time the Chinese and Pakistani immigrants they hide in the boot of the car are even lower down the scale. In its ending the film is non-judgmental – it brings a resolution to the events of the story without promising a rosy future. Ultimately it’s about poor people doing what they have to do to survive, repaying debts of one kind or another and struggling to get on with their lives from one day to the next. Highly recommended.