The movie opens on a cold winter day—a few days before Christmas. We first see the face of a crying woman, Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), smoking a cigarette; her teeth are cigarette-stained and her faces is ruddy, almost malnourished. Ray is sitting on the front step of her single-wide trailer. One gets the impression that she is living from day to day. Ray is crying because her husband has just taken off with the all of the money that they had saved for a major payment on a double-wide trailer. He is a compulsive gambler and has taken off in one of their two old cars, leaving her and her two sons without any money. It soon becomes clear that this is not the first time he has done this and that neither she nor her 15-year-old son, T.J. (Charlie DcDermott), expects him to come back. Yet, she goes to the Bingo parlor in the nearby Mohawk reservation (between New York State and Quebec) to try to find him. With barely enough money to buy gas (and without the $5 entrance fee needed to get into the bingo place), she begs the woman taking the admission fee to let her go into the place to just look for her husband. She is not admitted. When she comes back to her car, she sees a young Indian woman, Lila (Misty Upham) driving off in her husband's car (which had been left abandoned with the keys in the seat).Ray follows Lila to her small trailer to get her car back. As Ray retrieves her car, Lila tells her that she has a friend who will pay $2,000 for it (more than it is worth---and without papers). Why? He is a smuggler who is always looking for cars with pop up trunks. Ray agrees to have Lila show her to the buyer, while showing Lila her gun and telling her that she is not afraid to use it if she has to. To get to the car dealer, they have to cross a wide frozen river (the St. Lawrence?—the St. Regis?) that divides the Mohawk reservation and serves as the border between Canada and the US. When they reach Lila's friend on the other side of the international border, he gives them $1,200 as two people are being into the trunk to be taken to the US. Thus begins the reluctant smuggling relationship between Ray and Lila with Lila supplying the contacts and Ray supplying the car with the pop trunk--as well as the fact that Ray is 'white' and police won't suspect her of smuggling across people the border. Lila and Ray make several smuggling 'runs,' with no two coming off the same. However, when the arrangement goes wrong, the consequences affect both women and families in an unexpected way. The story and characters are well-developed in this screenplay (written and directed by Courtney Hunt), and Melissa Leo's acting is well worth her Oscar nomination. Leo would eventually win an Oscar for her role in The Fighter (2011).

This is pretty effective cinema. It's dark and not upbeat of course, but I don't think that it's incredibly downbeat or too realistic or tough to handle. Its reality is still based on somewhat contrived moments in the story, but not enough to take us out of it. It works. It reminds me of a lesser Winter's Bone, and it doesn't have the atmosphere and haunting tone that that film had. Melissa Leo is very good and very effective, but I also found Misty Upham to be a revelation and also very effective. In many ways, she's the heart of the film. I found some of the ending implausible and still rather decent, but the strings being pulled see to be visible.

Frozen River caused quite the stir when it was realised four years back. After lots of festival attention, it earned two Academy Awards nominations. The first was for writer-director Courtney Hunt's original screenplay, and the second was a best actress nod for Melissa Leo. Finally catching up with this film, as the first in my "SHITTY Christmas!" series, I'm firstly left bemused as to why the Academy were so impressed with the clunky script, and secondly, angry that Leo's staggering performance didn't get the gong it deserved.Set on the snowbound American side of the New York/Quebec border, Leo plays the fatigued shop assistant Ray, with a ballsy, pugnacious streak. That ruthless attitude proves useful when her gambling addict husband takes off with the money the pair had been saving for a new static caravan home. Leaving crumbs for her and their two kids the week before Christmas, Ray must find a steadfast way to quash the family debt, settle the final payment on the new house, and have enough money to plant gifts underneath the tree.But luck strikes in the strangest of places. Whilst she's out wielding a gun and hunting for her husband, Ray bumps into the stoical Lila (Misty Upham), a young woman from a neighbouring Mohawk reservation. She's desperate for money too, needing enough to start up a clean life with her baby boy son, currently being sheltered by her mother-in-law (similarly to Ray, her husband bailed too). Lila's figured out how to make extra cash by ferrying illegal immigrants across the border via the connected frozen river – but she needs a 'trustworthy-looking' white woman to carry out the scheme.From the offset, it's clear that Ray & Lila's relationship is strictly professional. They argue, point guns, and exchange flippant racial abuse at each other. But they have one thing in common, a desperation to do what's right for their respective families, and they're willing to break the law, risk prison and even death to see that happen.An alleged 14 years in the making, director-writer Courtney Hunt's debut feature is perhaps a little belaboured. What could have been a very tight, singular character study, ends up being diluted and drowned by the ancillary characters and the extraneous plot depths they bring. Misty Upham seems to be on the brink of solid, stoney-faced characterisation but, like the rest of the cast, she is also upstaged by Leo. It's a huge problem in this little, $1million budget movie. Whenever Melissa Leo isn't in the frame, Frozen River is too dour to be entertaining, and everything ends up grinding to a halt.Fortunately enough, Hunt is aware that Leo really is the star of the movie, giving her the respect, creative license and screen time she deserves to pull off one astonishing breakthrough performance. In any other actor's hands, it would have been a melodramatic take on a woman on the brink of depression and despair. But, in something closely resembling Debra Granik's superior movie Winter's Bone, Leo turns Frozen River into an affecting, frosty depiction of female empowerment.Read more reviews here: www.366movies.com

This really is mediocre. Melissa Leo turns in a fine performance, the youth actors are terrible...not their fault, the director obviously had no clue how to work with kids. It's a tear jerker...but why do we care? All the B parts are horribly stereotyped as are Native Americans visually it looks like an undergraduate student film ...I'm guessing shot on th Red One, but not well. The illegal aliens whose lives are torn apart are treated like detritus. I'm not sure why I even gave this a 3 except that I want to support low budget film making, but you can do low budget and still have relevance...so, I have seen worse, but this is pretty bad. Watch it only because you feel the need to identify with independent film.