Frozen River,"" a film about two women's struggles and their unlikely alliance in a human smuggling ring, is a very real story; a human experience.
The film is a story of two women living in poverty in New York state during a Christmas season that is anything but joyous. Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is a mother of two who works a thankless retail job and needs to find cash quickly or she will lose the down payment on her new double-wide trailer home. One day, while searching for her vagrant, gambling-addicted husband, she encounters a Mohawk woman named Lila (Misty Upham) driving her husband's abandoned car and follows her back onto a reservation.
Instead of returning the car, Lila shows Ray how to use it to make quick cash smuggling illegal aliens across the icy St. Lawrence River from Canada. The two women clash, yet manage to tolerate one another in the name of desperation. Through all of this, audiences slowly learn about Ray's 15-year-old son's small-time criminal exploits selling stolen credit card numbers, and Lila's 1-year-old son, whom Lila's mother-in-law has taken from her. In one scene, Ray and her sons eat popcorn and Tang for dinner because Ray does not have money to buy food.
In a series of hostile encounters, police chases and close calls, the audience sympathizes with both of these women. The audience wants to see Ray get the home and feels Lila's pain over her son and her inability to work. The audience sees two people, who, though different on the surface, understand one another on a much deeper level, living on the cusp of starvation, trying to make ends meet.
Although the plot is based on a situation unfamiliar to most, Leo and Upham's performances make it seem both familiar and real. The audience sees into the lives of these characters and gets to know them.
Everything comes at a price in this story. Nobody wins and nobody loses. The story ends, things work themselves out and life goes on. There are no good guys or bad guys; there are only real, relatable people. The story shows audiences humanity and the effects of poverty and desperation on the human experience. This is not a happy or sad story, but a real story.
Grade: AB
