BlissAndConversation.com

REVIEWING YOUR LIFE ON STAGE AND SCREEN

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.

          Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, this suspenseful and realistic film emanates a chill which comes from more than the bleak snowy landscape between Canada and New York State.  Ray (Melissa Leo) sheds helpless hopeless tears as she faces a desolate Christmas scarred with the desertion of her husband who has gambled away the money they’ve saved for a bigger trailer home for the family, which includes two boys, teen-age T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and little Ricky (James Reilly).

          Out of desperation she teams up with a Native American woman, Lila (Misty Upham) whose own child has been stolen by the mother of her late husband. Trapped in a small town offering only minimum-wage jobs, their only access to the money they need for their families is smuggling illegal immigrants over the Canadian border.  Misty grimly admits the police don’t stop white women drivers.  Their best escape route is over the frozen St. Lawrence River between the two countries.

          It’s a dangerous life and writer/director Courtney Hunt never forgets it, directing with a spare sensibility that doesn’t gloss over her characters’ flaws.  Ray is afraid of foreigners.  She and Lila gradually learn to trust each other but her fear of a young Pakistani couple being terrorists is so irrationally intense that she throws their duffel bag out the car window into the snow.  Later they learn the couple’s baby was in that bag.  

          The film is leavened by the love and humor in the scenes between Ray and her 6-year-old Ricky and the conflicts of being the single mother of a teen-ager who misses his dad and blames her anger for his father’s desertion.  James Reilly and Charlie McDermott are both endearing and devastatingly credible.

          Melissa Leo’s fierceness is complemented by the stoic stubbornness of Upham’s Lila.  Their relationship, born of mutual need suppressing mutual loathing, changes as their smuggling runs become more hazardous.

          In a summer of recurring Bats and Greek Island dancers, this small indelible film is a reminder and example of truth in filmmaking.