This Week on DVD

Frozen River
3.5 Stars out of 5
Courier Review
By CHUCK BROWN


Frozen River might be one of the best movies of 2008 you've never heard of (unless you're an independent film fan or festival follower – it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival).
Set along the Canada-U.S. border in bleak communities where the biggest of dreams include striking it rich at high-stakes bingo and saving up to buy a new double-wide, Frozen River is a chilling exploration of a border town’s dark side – something those of us who live here and read the news have been learning about recently.
Life is harsh in Massena, N.Y., but this story could just as easily have been set in St. Stephen-Calais. It is dark, it is tense and it is real -- not exactly a good escape from what has been a depressing, at times horrifying, winter here in Charlotte County. No, this is certainly no National Treasure or Journey to the Center of the Earth. Frozen River is real life and in the worst way, a story about the impoverished and their desperate struggle to earn enough money to simply survive. It is a story about women, about race and about how morals shift depending on perspective and how doing the “right thing” can be so different, depending on a person’s station in life.
This is the story of two single mothers, one white, one native. Ray Eddy (played by Melissa Leo, who is nominated for an Oscar for this role) plays a mother of two boys, aged 5 and 15, who, in the film's opening scenes, learns her gambling addicted husband has deserted the family and taken, or lost, the down payment for their new double-wide trailer home. Ray’s is a life of repo men, scrounging change for her kids’ school lunches and even, between paychecks, serving popcorn and Tang for dinner.
In her half-hearted search for her husband at the Mohawk-run bingo parlour, she encounters Lila (Misty Upham), a Mohawk widow whose mother-in-law "stole" her baby. The first meeting wasn’t a positive one – Ray sees Lila driving off in her husband's car. She follows Lila through snowy woods roads to her tiny trailer home and, in a tense confrontation, makes it clear Lila won't be keeping what belongs to Ray.
But Lila has an intriguing offer – she tells Ray she can sell one of her cars to a smuggler, who she knows will pay more than its worth.
Lila is known to authorities, on and off the reservation, as a smuggler - at one time of cigarettes when, she said, everyone was in on it, even the troopers. But now her cargo is human. Lila takes Ray on a tense journey across the frozen river into Mohawk territory in Canada. There is no border, Lila tells Ray. This is Mohawk country. This is free trade.
They pick up their passengers - two Chinese men - who climb into the trunk. The women are handed an envelope of cash and we later learn that "snakeheads" pay to bring the immigrants illegally to the U.S. at a cost of $50,000 then make them work it off doing who-knows-what. The women's cut for each pair they transport is $2,400 and, while protesting the legality of the operation initially, Ray can't resist the cash and the dream of making the payment on that trailer. It's something she'd never be able to do the honest way at her part-time job at the dollar store where she has to beg, unsuccessfully, a smarmy young manager to give her full-time hours.
After a few relatively easy scores, Lila decides she has to give up the smuggling life but Ray, desperate to make the trailer payment, convinces her to do one last run. Their final cargo is a couple from Pakistan - "Where's that?" Ray asks. She also becomes suspicious of a duffle bag placed in her back seat and wonders if it contains explosives, if her cargo is a couple of terrorists. Lila doesn’t care. A job’s a job. Scary. But Ray dumps the cargo on the middle of the frozen river and is later shocked to learn what she left behind. I won't give it away.
Frozen River is a bleak and depressing tale that illustrates how desperation, strength and a love for their children will drive these two women. It is pretty much a perfect indie movie and would warrant four stars or better on that merit. I’m giving it 3.5 out of five only because I know this is not a film for everyone and I like to save scores of four or higher for movies I think most anyone would enjoy.

Movies for This Week on DVD are provided by Movie Gallery in St. Stephen.