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Frozen River is about two women who team up to take extraordinary risks out of financial need. If it's killer performances and heart-in-mouth tension you're after at the movies, this is the indie outing for you.
The rules are a little different on the Mohawk land that runs between Quebec and upper New York State, and it's possible -- though illegal, obviously -- to cross between the U.S. and Canada just by driving across the frozen St. Lawrence. Making that crossing with illegal immigrants in the trunk of your car can be big business, as Ray (Melissa Leo) and Lila (Misty Upham) find out.
When Ray discovers that her husband has gone off to gamble with the family savings, she frantically goes looking for him in the depressed little backwater town where they live. She retrieves his car from a Mohawk woman, but not without pulling her gun; the Aboriginal woman, Lila, eventually shows Ray what a car can be used for when the St. Lawrence is frozen. It's a few days before Christmas, and Ray has two kids who won't be getting any presents this year, now that dad has run off with all the money. A lot of money changes hands for smuggling illegals, and Ray wants some of that money for her family.
On her side, Lila has her own reasons to need cash. She wants to get her baby boy back from her in-laws, who are raising the child.
Ray and Lila never quite drop what seems to be the standard issue tension between natives and whites, but they work together, albeit with friction, to do a few runs across the river before Christmas happens.
Ray is fine with most of the illegals they smuggle, who are Asian, but when a South Asian man and woman turn up, Ray is worried about their luggage. What if this Pakistani couple are terrorists? She makes a decision about their duffel bag that brings both women far too close to tragedy. And yet they still don't stop taking risks.
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Frozen River is both a thriller and a complicated study of poverty and racism, and rarely has a movie played out against such a desolate background. Ray's ambition is to move her family into a decent double-wide trailer; both she and Lila live in run-down trailers in a nasty little corner of the world. Their town is grey and frozen and depressing.
The sequences in which the women drive the dangerous route across the St. Lawrence are anxiety-provoking in the extreme. They inch along on iffy ice with the potential for death or prison ever-present. The camera is often right in their faces, amplifying the fear and the claustrophobic atmosphere in the car. One trooper (Michael O'Keefe) hovers over their lives, watching Ray's car go back and forth into Mohawk territory. His growing awareness of her travels fuels the tension further, as does the increasingly risky behaviour undertaken by Ray's teenage son (Charlie McDermott).
Frozen River was written and directed by Courtney Hunt. It is her debut feature film. The low-budget film was shot in 24 freezing cold days in Plattsburgh, New York, and it's won several film festival awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year.
(This film is rated 14-A)