'Frozen River': A flowing tale

'River' is a satisfying story about pair who help smuggle immigrants

By Michael Sragow

September 5, 2008

Frozen River takes place during hard times in upstate New York, but there's no economic problem to the storytelling. Writer-director Courtney Hunt swiftly establishes a two-pronged narrative formula that keeps an audience on tenterhooks.

Within minutes, a hard-bitten wife and mother named Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), living in a small town outside the Mohawk Reservation on the border with Quebec, discovers her gambling-addicted husband has skipped town with the money she promised her two children would go to a double-wide trailer. (They live in a cramped single-wide.) Searching for him in the nearest Indian-run bingo den, she comes face to face instead with a cryptic Mohawk named Lila (Misty Upham) who blithely drives off with his car.

Hunt focuses a ruthless eye on the fraying texture of lives that wear out before our eyes. But within this gritty naturalistic context, she creates an atmosphere in which you feel anything can happen. Ray shoots a gun through Lila's trailer door, and instead of triggering a battle royal, it becomes the catalyst to a partnership. Ray takes the driver's seat and Lila rides shotgun when the two pair up to smuggle illegal immigrants from Canada across the frozen St. Lawrence River into Mohawk territory. In terms of law, if not geography, nobody knows exactly where U.S. authority begins and Mohawk rule ends. That confusion adds to the film's distinctive, low-key volatility.

Hunt wrings heartbreaking ironies from the juxtaposition of the white world's obliviousness to Native Americans and the callousness of all Americans to illegal immigrants. The nocturnal scenes are so dominant and scary that the whole movie seems to take place in a long dark night of the soul; for once, the snow and ice are tracked and scarred, not glassily pictorial.

All sorts of addictions waft across the movie's surface - not just the usual ones, to gambling or to drugs. What's most addictive is the idea that just having enough money can enable these generally well-meaning women to fix their lives, no matter how ill-gotten their gains may be.

Hunt is particularly adept at dramatizing how parents teach children values without knowing it; Ray thinks she's protecting her two boys when she's really teaching her son TJ (Charlies McDermott) how to lie and work scams without compunction.

And Hunt plants concrete props and actions in the story that take on symbolic importance without underlining, such as a welder's torch that tears Ray and TJ asunder. Lila needs a driver because she can't see well enough to drive without glasses and refuses to purchase and wear a pair of specs. She wants to win back the child her mother-in-law took from her, but she's blindly rebellious in her manner of going about doing it.

Among other things, the film is about the grudging, slow-blooming sisterhood between Ray and Lila, a partnership of necessity that grows into a partnership of sympathy. The movie's larger meanings are enhanced by the becoming modesty of Hunt's direction, which doesn't force anything. These meanings reach full bloom, though, because of the size of the performances.

Upham imbues Lila's opacity with some welcome playfulness, McDermott has a pressure-cooker emotionality as a pent-up teenage boy about to pop, and Michael O'Keefe brings wells of understanding to the role of a smart, sympathetic state trooper.

Of course, it's Leo's movie. Ray can be racist, crude and reckless, yet without special pleading, Leo takes you so far into her soul you never reduce her to a sociological label. Nothing Leo does is predictable. With a ferocious brusqueness true to her downward-spiraling character, she turns potentially melodramatic moments into instants of tragic catastrophe akin to the climaxes in Thomas Hardy. Her suggestion that Ray can't express every feeling that lies deep within her keeps the movie from becoming grueling. The signal insight of Leo's performance, and Hunt's movie, is that without being "saved" or "redeemed," and solely on the basis of what used to be called "fellow feeling," a damaged character like Ray can make the right move after a series of devastatingly bad ones. That's why Frozen River is a solid, satisfying movie.

Frozen River

( Sony Pictures Classics) Starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charles McDermott, Michael O'Keefe. Directed by Courtney Hunt. Rated R for some language. Time 97 minutes.