Her film is all show, no tell. It doesn't whine or speechify or make liberal-minded, quasi-political appeals for relief of its characters' hard lives. She lets us come to care for Ray at our own unforced pace, and Leo plays superbly in that patient vein. There's nothing overtly heroic about her as she plods forward under her burden of her small-scale dreams. She's not cynical, but she's not expecting much, either. She's just knowing and accepting of what fate, good or bad, but never transformative, throws at her.
You can see it in her eyes, in her wiry body's alertness to both danger and opportunity. The reserve in Leo's performance, the way it earns our sympathy without asking for it is, is screen acting of the highest order. And her seeming artlessness is reflected, as well, in the rest of the no-name cast's work. In the end, you feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention.
All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Her husband drowned on a smuggling run. Their infant son was snatched from her hospital crib by her mother-in-law. And she has been collared by the law before, which is why the local car dealership won't sell her a vehicle with a push-button boot, the easiest kind for smuggling.
The film is full of such details that hint at the research Hunt undertook before writing her script which began life as a short with the same lead actors. We also learn that illegal immigrants are deprived of their footwear before the drive into the US, to stop them absconding at the other end before they've had a chance to work off the many thousands of dollars they owe to the unscrupulous 'Snakehead' gangs who have arranged safe passage. One hesitates to ask for more from a film that already feels over-burdened with incident, but a few morsels of information about the immigrants Ray and Lila are transporting would have been invaluable.
As it stands, they function as commodities not just to the smugglers and Snakeheads but to the film itself, which ventures into their lives only when some increase in suspense can be engineered, or some insight into the main characters facilitated. In an episode which comes halfway through the picture but feels more like a climax, Ray discards on the ice a hold-all belonging to the Pakistani couple who are in her car boot - she grumbles that it might be a bomb. In fact, the bag contains a sleeping baby, and Ray and Lila are forced to retrieve it after first unloading the distraught parents at a motel.
So we have a poor and desperate married couple taking refuge at an inn, and a newborn infant in peril. By a strange quirk of fate, or scriptwriting, it happens also to be Christmas Eve. As that sequence makes clear, Hunt is not afraid to go gunning for tears. At times she shows her inexperience with a little too much telegraphing of plot points and subtext, the sure sign of a director not yet confident in her ability to convey information, or in her audience's ability to interpret it.
The poster advertising 'High Stakes' outside the bingo hall where Lila works is laying it on a bit thick. There is also a broken-down carousel outside Ray's home, which is just begging to be spruced up and brought back into action in the final reel. On top of that, there are scenes that make no sense dramatically.
A trooper pulls Ray over about a broken tail-light, then calls at her home the next morning to tell her that Lila is a bad apple. But it's Christmas Day, for goodness' sake: where's the urgency?
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