I'm all for gritty portrayals of the poor that avoid cutesy characters - the criminally unknown Bubble by Steven Soderbergh being one - but Frozen River's token efforts at sympathy for the underclass give way to a superficial saga of grime and brooding.

The protagonist (Melissa Leo) is working part-time in the dollar store and her boss doesn't think she's enough of a go-getter. Her plan to upgrade to a new trailer is thwarted when her compulsive gambler husband skips town with their money, meaning her two sons must subsist on popcorn and Tang.

Her search for him leads her to the Indian bingo hall, and at absurdly contrived time, a dour Native American woman (Misty Upham) steals her husband's car. The attempt to retrieve the car leads to, what else, a lucrative job smuggling illegal immigrants across the body of water referenced in the title, which spans a stretch of the Indian reservation that links Canada and U.S. The sovereign status keeps nosy state troopers away.

These women hate each other, but guess what, deep down they have a lot in common. They both live in trailers, for instance, eventually leading to the mawkish discussion about the big shiny mobile home that Melissa Leo is saving up for. It even has a Jacuzzi. Tell me again about the rabbits, George.

The movie has nice photography of the bleak winter in upstate NY, but it lost me when the women casually pulled guns on each other and were unfazed enough to continue sitting next to each other in a car to work on their illegal joint venture. Why, those poor folks, they don't even care if someone has a gun pointed at them, just another hardscrabble day in The Other America.

The cross-border drives are suspenseful and provide cool imagery. The interactions with the immigrants and the middlemen are quite tense. Too bad there's an effort to increase the tension with an absurd diversion that I can't disclose. I'll just say that it comes out of nowhere, and establishes an inhumanty that movie can't recover from.
In an effort at "realism" the characters are intentionally unsympathetic, but then in the end there's an abrupt turn into Lifetime territory. Overall, it's like a high school junior's attempt at an Oscar movie, and you'll find more nuanced portrayals of trailer life in 8 Mile

Recommended: No