I'm afraid I side with Michael McGonigle and "Turfseer" and "zetes," who, as of this writing, have offered up the only negative appraisals of this film (and extremely perceptive ones at that).
Aside from an excellent performance by Charlie McDermott as a resourceful 15-year-old, "Frozen River" has one major virtue: the bleak, wintry, impoverished upstate New York setting, which lends the movie its tone. It was apparently shot in Plattsburgh, and let's just say the town does not come off as a garden spot. I've lived and worked in places like that, and they definitely aren't charming in the winter -- especially if, as in this film, you concentrate on shabby trailers, bare front yards, clapboard general stores, slate-grey skies, and lonely, icy roads. Which is fine, by the way; it's a genuine slice of northern America, raw and poor and forbidding, and I assume it is this setting that's mainly responsible for the acclaim the movie has received -- this and the landscape's human equivalent, Melissa Leo's hard, unglamorous, unyouthful face.
That raw, hardscrabble locale is certainly what attracted me to the film. And in fact, "Frozen River" seems to have been given something of a pass by critics because of its gritty look, because it gives a starring role, for a change, to an unglamorous middle-aged actress, and because it displays familiar liberal sympathies (for impoverished single moms, Native Americans, and desperate illegal Third World immigrants, including two very attractive young Chinese women).
Unfortunately, bleak look aside, "River" was a well-intentioned disappointment. For one, it's all too predictable: You KNOW that when Ray (Melissa Leo's character) tosses a Pakistani couple's suspicious bundle out the car window into the snow, she'll later learn there was a baby inside; you know that the baby will eventually be returned alive (Ray's the heroine, for God's sake, not a baby-killer); you know that Ray and Lila, the Mohawk woman, are going to overcome their mutual hostility as the film progresses and that, in a show of transracial solidarity, they'll bond and learn to respect each other; you know that something's going to go wrong on that "one last smuggling run" the two women are compelled to take.
I concur with my three fellow IMDb commenters that the Pakistanis' passivity in handing over their baby to strangers -- and in the face of its apparent death -- seems downright unbelievable; ditto Ray's unseen husband's running off at Christmastime with the family's meager savings; ditto Ray's inability to put decent food on the table in this era of food stamps; ditto a clumsy, unconvincing scene in which Lila, previously denied her baby, simply strolls into her mother-in-law's home and, ignoring said mother-in-law, silently walks off with the child. Too many scenes, like this one, just come off looking amateurish.
But the main problem I had is with the unrealistically spare dialogue -- as if the director/screenwriter had scribbled down a few bare bones of conversation in the expectation that her actors would improvise, build upon them, and flesh out the scenes, only to have the actors stick to those few curt words.
People who live in rural communities and small towns TALK to one another. They talk a lot -- often too much, I've found. They tell stories; they ramble on. They're known for it down south, but they do it up north as well. They are amiable and humorous; even when they have something serious to say, they say it with a smile. It's how they get along, especially in a somewhat inhospitable environment, because they have to rely on one another. It's what cements a community. In short, people up there are generally friendly. (In fact, let me go further: Assuming circumstances don't compel them to be otherwise, human beings as a species are generally friendly.)
Yet filmmakers -- with some unconscious class condescension, I suspect -- are always depicting their northern rural characters as curt and taciturn and dour, as if the filmmakers assume that these people are as hard-bitten as the landscape. (In "Affliction," a similarly unsatisfying movie set in a wintry small town, this time in New England, I recall that most of the characters treated the hero -- a disgraced onetime local law-enforcement officer, played by Nick Nolte -- with rudeness and undisguised contempt. And it simply didn't ring true. First, you don't keep dumping on someone Nick Nolte's size; second, people want to be buddies with cops and sheriffs, even former ones; third, the entire populace seemed improbably sour and nasty.)
Repeatedly, in "Frozen River," we're shown what passes for "conversations" that consist of a few muttered words back and forth, whereas in real life there'd be lots and lots of talk. One weirdly perfunctory scene has a Mohawk man demand that Ray's teenaged son apologize to an old woman the boy has tried to scam. The boy mumbles "Sorry" and walks away; the man instantly accepts it and drives off with the woman. It's a clueless screenwriter's idea of how a scene like that might play out among taciturn rural types; it's utterly fake, unconvincing, and, again, amateurish. And a crucial scene at the end, in which Lila arrives at Ray's trailer with her child and simply barges in on the son without explanation and with practically no words exchanged, seems almost ludicrous, as if the screenwriter had just plain run out of inspiration.
Aside from an excellent performance by Charlie McDermott as a resourceful 15-year-old, "Frozen River" has one major virtue: the bleak, wintry, impoverished upstate New York setting, which lends the movie its tone. It was apparently shot in Plattsburgh, and let's just say the town does not come off as a garden spot. I've lived and worked in places like that, and they definitely aren't charming in the winter -- especially if, as in this film, you concentrate on shabby trailers, bare front yards, clapboard general stores, slate-grey skies, and lonely, icy roads. Which is fine, by the way; it's a genuine slice of northern America, raw and poor and forbidding, and I assume it is this setting that's mainly responsible for the acclaim the movie has received -- this and the landscape's human equivalent, Melissa Leo's hard, unglamorous, unyouthful face.
That raw, hardscrabble locale is certainly what attracted me to the film. And in fact, "Frozen River" seems to have been given something of a pass by critics because of its gritty look, because it gives a starring role, for a change, to an unglamorous middle-aged actress, and because it displays familiar liberal sympathies (for impoverished single moms, Native Americans, and desperate illegal Third World immigrants, including two very attractive young Chinese women).
Unfortunately, bleak look aside, "River" was a well-intentioned disappointment. For one, it's all too predictable: You KNOW that when Ray (Melissa Leo's character) tosses a Pakistani couple's suspicious bundle out the car window into the snow, she'll later learn there was a baby inside; you know that the baby will eventually be returned alive (Ray's the heroine, for God's sake, not a baby-killer); you know that Ray and Lila, the Mohawk woman, are going to overcome their mutual hostility as the film progresses and that, in a show of transracial solidarity, they'll bond and learn to respect each other; you know that something's going to go wrong on that "one last smuggling run" the two women are compelled to take.
I concur with my three fellow IMDb commenters that the Pakistanis' passivity in handing over their baby to strangers -- and in the face of its apparent death -- seems downright unbelievable; ditto Ray's unseen husband's running off at Christmastime with the family's meager savings; ditto Ray's inability to put decent food on the table in this era of food stamps; ditto a clumsy, unconvincing scene in which Lila, previously denied her baby, simply strolls into her mother-in-law's home and, ignoring said mother-in-law, silently walks off with the child. Too many scenes, like this one, just come off looking amateurish.
But the main problem I had is with the unrealistically spare dialogue -- as if the director/screenwriter had scribbled down a few bare bones of conversation in the expectation that her actors would improvise, build upon them, and flesh out the scenes, only to have the actors stick to those few curt words.
People who live in rural communities and small towns TALK to one another. They talk a lot -- often too much, I've found. They tell stories; they ramble on. They're known for it down south, but they do it up north as well. They are amiable and humorous; even when they have something serious to say, they say it with a smile. It's how they get along, especially in a somewhat inhospitable environment, because they have to rely on one another. It's what cements a community. In short, people up there are generally friendly. (In fact, let me go further: Assuming circumstances don't compel them to be otherwise, human beings as a species are generally friendly.)
Yet filmmakers -- with some unconscious class condescension, I suspect -- are always depicting their northern rural characters as curt and taciturn and dour, as if the filmmakers assume that these people are as hard-bitten as the landscape. (In "Affliction," a similarly unsatisfying movie set in a wintry small town, this time in New England, I recall that most of the characters treated the hero -- a disgraced onetime local law-enforcement officer, played by Nick Nolte -- with rudeness and undisguised contempt. And it simply didn't ring true. First, you don't keep dumping on someone Nick Nolte's size; second, people want to be buddies with cops and sheriffs, even former ones; third, the entire populace seemed improbably sour and nasty.)
Repeatedly, in "Frozen River," we're shown what passes for "conversations" that consist of a few muttered words back and forth, whereas in real life there'd be lots and lots of talk. One weirdly perfunctory scene has a Mohawk man demand that Ray's teenaged son apologize to an old woman the boy has tried to scam. The boy mumbles "Sorry" and walks away; the man instantly accepts it and drives off with the woman. It's a clueless screenwriter's idea of how a scene like that might play out among taciturn rural types; it's utterly fake, unconvincing, and, again, amateurish. And a crucial scene at the end, in which Lila arrives at Ray's trailer with her child and simply barges in on the son without explanation and with practically no words exchanged, seems almost ludicrous, as if the screenwriter had just plain run out of inspiration.