I love a movie that's about something I've never even thought about, or a completely unfamiliar place. The heroine here (Melissa Leo), if that’s the right word, finds herself with an opportunity to make ends meet by smuggling illegal immigrants. But she lives along the Canadian border, in the northernmost part of New York State. So the customers are not poor Mexicans, but Asians who've paid tens of thousands of dollars to be transported in a car trunk across land and ice claimed not by Canada or the United States, but the Mohawk tribe.
Leo plays a middle-aged mother of two whose husband has taken off to feed his gambling addiction, a woman who carries a pistol, who works in a dollar store, who doesn’t know where Pakistan is, who fears losing the down payment she put on a double-wide modular home. Her partner-in-crime is a Mohawk woman who’s not well-liked, or that likable, and one imagines that their serendipitous joint enterprise is about the only way these women would come into contact.
The cultural aspects are secondary to the plot, but certainly add to it. The setting is at once new and familiar. The location along the St. Lawrence river, in a part of America where the nearest big city is Montréal, is unusual enough, but the nondescript look of the place is what anyone who has driven much in rural America has seen. This is not the idyllic Americana that small-town movies emphasize, but the America built around old state highways and cheap architecture.
Everything about this movie is as believable as the lines on Leo's make-up-free face, the shot that begins the movie. (She’s very good, as is Indian actress Misty Upham.) This is a nicely compact drama about a mother, not illegal immigration or race relations. The ending may work too hard to ingratiate the characters rather than bring these social issues into sharper focus. It remains a small movie. But expect big things from its first-time writer-director, Courtney Hunt.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/17/08
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