Frozen River (2008)

Directed by Courtney Hunt. Starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, John Canoe, Michael O’Keefe. [R]

Leo gives an extraordinarily effective performance as Ray Eddy, a woman living in Upstate New York near the Canadian border, stuck doing part-time work as a clerk at a discount store. With two kids and an absent gambling-addict husband, she struggles to make ends meet, let alone save up for a down payment on a double-wide mobile home. By a twist of fate, she ends up in the company of a woman named Lila Littlewolf (Upham) living on a Mohawk reservation, and gets pressured into crossing the border and transporting Chinese illegals into the country. At first, she wants nothing to do with it, but when she realizes it’s an opportunity to quickly make some cold hard cash, she commits to an uneasy alliance with Lila to make several more trips. Writer/director Courtney Hunt’s feature debut, expanded from a short subject, deals in a lot of dour, poverty-level storytelling tropes, and multiple decisions (with consequences) are made over the course of the narrative that are hard to swallow at face value. But Hunt values mood and texture over plot devices and strict verisimilitude, and Leo is convincing in her transformations without ever resorting to showy demonstrations. Mark Boone Junior makes a couple of brief appearances (with a French Canadian accent!).

75/100