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Frozen River Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: R (for some language) Genre: Drama, Thriller Theater release: August 01, 2008 by Sony Pictures Classics Directed by: Courtney Hunt Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes Cast: Cast Melissa Leo (Ray Eddy), Misty Upham (Lila), Charlie McDermott (T.J.), Mark Boone Junior (Jacques Bruno), Michael O'Keefe (Trooper Finnerty), Jay Klaitz (Guy Versailles), John Canoe (Bernie Littlewolf), Dylan Carusona (Jimmy), and Michael Sky (Billy Three Rivers) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

A woman on the edge of despair, abandoned by her husband.

Her two sons—a teenager toying with crime, and a youngster glued to the television.

A young Mohawk woman in trouble with her tribe, who is losing her eyesight and grieving for her lost child.

Dangerous crooks offering wads of cash for volunteer smugglers of illegal aliens.

And a vast, frozen river that may as well be marked with a flashing neon sign: "SYMBOL! SYMBOL!"

Yes, Frozen River has everything you'd expect to find in a winner of the Sundance Film Festival's Jury Prize. It has tormented characters, "gritty" performances, cultural commentary, and a powerful sense of place (upstate New York, the St. Lawrence River, a Mohawk reservation). And while all of these elements are impressive, they fail to cohere into a satisfying whole.

Melissa Leo as Ray Eddy

Courtney Hunt's film is about the many trials of Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), whose husband Troy has absconded with the family's down payment for their soon-to-be-delivered doublewide home. Running out of money, Ray becomes desperate for a promotion at her Dollar Store day-job. She needs to put something better than popcorn and Tang on the dinner table for her two boys, T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and Ricky (James Reilly). Their family dreams look likely to crumble.

As if things aren't bad enough—T.J.'s favorite toy is a blowtorch, and he's involved in a credit card scam. And little Ricky dreams of finding a fancy set of Matchbox cars under the Christmas tree so that he can stage spectacular collisions.

Ray's furious pursuit of her husband leads her into an unexpected partnership with Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a distraught Mohawk woman who makes quick money by smuggling foreigners across the border from Canada into the U.S. Lila's got problems of her own. She's been kicked off the reservation for "spoiling" one of the tribe's beloved sons. Now she spends her days huddled in the fragile warmth of her own tiny trailer, pining for her baby who was "stolen" by the mother of her irresponsible ex. Unable to afford glasses for her deteriorating eyesight, Lila turns down office work because she can't read. The smuggling network offers her quick cash and survival, but it's risky.

Misty Upham as Lila

Ray, whose blind spots include sharp-edged racial prejudice and a carefree way with handguns, reluctantly joins forces with Lila. Together they creep back and forth across the frozen St. Lawrence River by night, stowing immigrants from all over the world in the trunk of Ray's Dodge Spirit (SYMBOL!). As cops on both sides of the border close in, Ray and Lila, the most desperate female partners since Thelma and Louise, find themselves on very thin … um, well, you get the picture.

The Sundance jury is consistently impressed by movies about ordinary people under extraordinary pressure. Think back to You Can Count on Me with Laura Linney's manic single mother; American Splendor with Paul Giamatti's cynical cartoonist; the three women in crisis in Personal Velocity: Three Portraits; the quiet grace of a glamour-free Ashley Judd in Ruby in Paradise; or even Frances McDormand's first turn with the Coens in Blood Simple.

This year, the jury embraced Melissa Leo, that beautifully broken presence who stole scenes in 21 Grams and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. It was only a matter of time before Leo was given a chance to unleash her remarkable powers in a leading role. And this turn is sure to earn her more opportunities.

Lila and Ray take desperate measures

Frozen River begins with a close-up of Leo's face, a magnificent ruin, as she tries to draw some relief from a cigarette. Her angst-filled expression would be enough to send a lot of moviegoers heading for the doors, thinking, Oh, no. Another insufferably morose indie drama. But Leo makes Ray's trouble arrestingly genuine—the two tears that spill simultaneously from her eyes capture us with the sense that this is a real person in a real moment of crisis, and she's won our hearts immediately.

Unfortunately, the rising tide of contrived crises swamp what began as a strong character study. When the film resorts to familiar, lurid, TV-thriller antics—like a gunpoint confrontation with a crime lord in a strip joint—we begin to see that Ray is much more dangerous and irrational than we thought. And when Ray throws out the luggage of some Pakistani stowaways, fearing that they might be terrorists infiltrating the U.S., suddenly the movie raises questions about post-9/11 paranoia, which only dilutes the film's thematic focus all the more. Ray's erratic behavior, not to mention her quick trigger finger, make us begin to understand why Troy ran away in the first place.

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