Frozen River

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Small, tough and brilliant indie drama.

Films about hard-scrabble lives on the breadline often simultaneously patronise their subjects and glamorise the grim reality of their situations.

This astonishingly assured feature debut for writer-director Hunt does neither. Written and acted with precision, it is sombre, gripping and unsentimental, and leaves us with a real sense of what life is like in the world it evokes.

That world, grey and bleak and icy, is in upstate New York near the Quebec border, where small-town folk uneasily coexist with the local Mohawk, whose reservation straddles the St Lawrence River. Among them is Ray Eddy (Leo), a discount-store checkout assistant and the tough-as-nails mother of a teenager (McDermott) and a 5-year-old (Reilly).

When Ray discovers her husband has shot through with the money they had saved to buy a mobile home, she goes searching for him in the gambling dens on the reservation and crosses paths with Lila Littlewolf (Upham), a young Mohawk woman with problems of her own. At first unwittingly and then reluctantly, Ray becomes drawn into a scam that takes advantage of the murky legal status of the Mohawk land: shipping illegal immigrants by car across the river of the title.

We may detect debts to Ken Loach in the grim social realism, but Hunt isn't trying to sell us a message. She's alive to the fact that people under pressure might do bad things for good reasons and she effortlessly maintains the tension between the story's many contradictions. Ray makes a better driver than Lila because the cops are less likely to stop her, but the scam would not exist without the icy Indian trail.

So whose operation is it? And what of the nameless, faceless men in the boot? In a post-9/11 world, not all illegal aliens are simply yearning to be free.

Backdropping all the drama is the tension raised by the passages across the ice, which creaks and cracks beneath the car: as an image of impending disaster, it's a symbol both robust and understated and it has us on the edge of our seats.

Hunt plays it commendably straight, leaving her actors to carry the film, and the two women and O'Keefe as a state trooper turn in fantastic performances. It's not the happiest film of the summer, but it's likely to be one of the best.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Michael O'Keefe, Charlie McDermott, James Reilly

Director:

Courtney Hunt

Running time:

97 mins

Rating:

M (low-level violence)

Screening:

Rialto