How far will a mother go to make a better life for her children? It’s a question that Frozen River, the debut film by writer-director Courtney Hunt, asks and attempts to answer in this remarkably textured and compelling story set close to the Canadian border in upstate New York.
Ray (Melissa Leo, best known for her role on Homicide: Life on the Streets and in 21 Grams) and her two sons have just been left by her no-good gambling husband, who has taken off with a wad of money earmarked for the family’s move into a new double-wide trailer. She sets off to the nearby Mohawk reservation, hoping to find her husband in the local bingo hall. She does manage to find his abandoned car, which is now in the possession of Lila (Misty Upham), a young native woman living in a trailer even more modest than Ray’s current home. After an altercation, Lila tells Ray that she knows a guy looking to buy cars to use in a cross-border smuggling operation. The pair drive across a frozen river (which also serves as an unprotected gateway into Canada) and Ray begins a reluctant career smuggling illegal immigrants.
While smuggling acts as the backbone of Frozen River’s plot, and the women’s exploits do provide for some heart-stopping moments, the meat of the story is in the relationship between Ray and Lila, as well as their individual maternal instincts. Hunt easily could have turned this into a Thelma & Louise with snow, but she treats the story with a subtlety that gives the characters a unique depth. Ray is so desperate to give her boys a nice home and to keep her older son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott), in school that she finds herself slipping into a life she’d never imagined. And Lila, numbed by the hardships of reserve life and her in-laws’ de facto custody of her one-year-old son, is awakened by her partner’s fighter instinct.
Of course, none of this would work if it weren’t for remarkable performances from Leo and Upham, who both pull off a skilled combination of toughness and fragility. Set against the harsh northern winter, small-town dollar stores and trailer homes, these women and their director have created a film that cuts much deeper than the basic plot of an otherwise simple crime drama.
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