Frozen River Movie Review 2008

Frozen River 2008

97 min
Rated R

Subtitles and Closed Captions

Genres Drama
Director Courtney Hunt
Starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Michael O'Keefe

Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) and Lila (Misty Upham) in 2008 movie Frozen River

Two hardened single mothers are trying to make lives for their children. Both single mothers are faced with desperate circumstances. A middle-aged mother played by Melissa Leo runs across a Native American woman, Lila Littlewolf. Both desperate mothers are drawn into the world of border smuggling across the frozen water of the St. Lawrence River, a Mohawk Indian reservation on the NY/Canadian border which survives on smuggling and human trafficking across the Canadian border.

The budget for this movie was somewhere between $500k and $1 Million and is both compelling and suspenseful. This story deals with a desperate mothers struggling with poverty and a paucity of choices in northern NY State.