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In Frozen River, Melissa Leo stars as Ray, a woman whose husband has stolen the family's money for their new double-wide trailer and left the family. She works at a bargain store, it's almost Christmas, the kids have almost nothing, and if she doesn't come up with more money, her deposit will be forfeited and the double-wide will be lost. Ray barely has enough money to feed her sons popcorn for breakfast much less come up with that kind of money, and when she goes looking for her husband she finds that an Native American woman named Lila is driving his car around town because she thought it was abandoned. After a confrontation and some deception, Lila leads Ray into the reservation, which covers part of the U.S. and part of Canada, and involves her in smuggling people across the border in the back of her trunk.

Frozen River is another movie that toys with the idea of illegal immigration in one of the most sympathetic forms possible, but at least it isn't the focus of the movie and it doesn't feel agenda-based like The Visitor did. Instead, the focus is on the character of Ray, and surprisingly, Lila as well. It's an indie mother movie. It almost reminded me of The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton as a mother who does everything in her power to keep her son safe from suspicion in a murder case.

I was talking about this movie with K from my office, and we both agreed that it was a better movie than we expected, but felt that the script was a little bit heavy-handed in the mother/child theme. Lila is also a mother, although she has no relationship with her kid. And the point of the movie is showing the similarities between these two contrasted mothers, but there's one part of the movie that causes a short bit of crisis involving a child being smuggled across the border that bothered me. While it did serve a bit of a purpose in the development Lila's character, it felt like she could have reached the same conclusion without such a blatant plot device. Who knows - it might have been a pivotal scene for the writer (and I could see it working with a short story, maybe), but the emphasis on mothers and children could have been a little lighter. Some of the dangerous elements of the movie went a little farther than necessary as well.

I did like the overall quiet telling of this story, and while I enjoyed Leo and , my favorite character was actually Ray's son Troy, played by Charlie McDermott. He struggles with being loyal to his dad, angry at his mom, wanting to care for his younger brother, being a kid, and wanting to be his own man. I think that element was what pushed the movie to be much better than it would have been if Ray and Lila had been the only main characters. Overall, though, I was surprised and pleased with Frozen River. I went into it with no real interest except to see an Academy-nominated performance, and it turned out to be a good little movie.