frozen river

“Frozen River” has been playing for several weeks in New York. It is a small movie without any big stars, but by no means a quiet movie. On the contrary, it is a very tense story of two women from very different backgrounds, each desperate in her own way. Their paths cross by chance and they form an abrupt partnership based on mutual distrust and their own risky personal agendas. At several moments the stage is set for clichéd wrenches of the heart, but happily the action does not follow through with a Hollywood delivery.

The movie features two women looking out for themselves in lives in which the odds are stacked against them. They live on the border of New York and Canada, in Mohawk territory and see only their differences, primarily race, not how actually similar their lives are. Lila is a Native American woman whose past is not made very clear, but who has alienated a lot of people in her tribal community, including her mother-in-law, who blames her for the death of her son—which is never explained—and who took her child from the hospital at birth. She lives in a small trailer that does not out the cold. The smuggling of equally desperate human beings into the US that the film features might be just one of her crimes.

Ray is a working class white woman barely holding her family together on her dollar store salary, where she is told she has no future and no right to expect any advancement. Her husband, a recently lapsed gambler, has disappeared with the money they’d saved to buy a house—a “doublewide,” manufactured house—and she is trying to get the money for the balloon payment in order to give her sons the house she’s promised and to avoid losing her deposit of $1500. That deposit is big money to a woman who digs through her pockets and under the sofa cushions to give her sons their lunch money, and who feeds them .

She has only a few days to raise more than $3000 to give her sons the Christmas gift of a new home. By accident—and by force—she happens to provide the transportation that short-sighted Lila needs for a smuggling job. She persuades Ray to drive across the ice of the St. Lawrence River saying that she can provide a cash buyer for Ray’s car. Once across the river, Lila’s persuasion turns to force. She grabs Ray’s gun to get her to open her trunk for two Chinese men to climb in. They return across the river as Lila insists that U.S. law does not apply on tribal land. Ray provides not only transportation, but also legitimacy: Lila claims that the troopers will not pull them over because Ray is white. Lila steals the payment she promised to split with Ray, and after reviewing her financial situation, Ray goes back to make another trip and evens the score.

Each of the women operates under her own code of right and wrong, mostly subject to personal necessity, that do not have much to do with that imposed by the American legal system. Their codes are dictated by absent men and by children, present and absent. They have in common with the people that they transport their desperation, though they do not seem to see it mirrored from the others and seem to consider themselves somehow superior to the goods they deliver.

The ending is somewhat surprising. The Hollywood tradition almost demands it, but when it comes it still a surprise, based on the way the characters have behaved so far, and on their apparent continued mutual distrust and disregard for one another. However, they are bound together as impoverished women trying to keep their families together, trying for nothing more than a safe and completely ordinary normality. They prove able to move beyond imposed self-sufficiency to make great sacrifices for each other’s children.

You can see the trailer here.