Wow, this is a REALLY bad movie!

Perfect cast and a good story

Absolutely brilliant

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Hard living in the reservation, becomes even more ungiving against the bitter cold and frozen north. While this film succeeds in painting that lifeless landscape, the people are as unsympathetic toward each other as well. Ray is hard-edged as a 50 something white woman whose no-good gambling husband finally left for good, leaving her, a small child and an angry 15 year old teen. More than her match is Lila, who wore the same dour expression throughout the movie. No one seems to like each other. Ok I get that, life is hard on the reservation. But these people dont seem to be helping themselves either. The biggest complaint comes when Ray (Melissa Leo) is caught smuggling two chinese women, asks the cop, who was the most sympathetic voice in this whole ordeal, how long would she be locked up. "Four years", he says, "unless you are on a watch list". She was relieved. Only 4 years ? Thats easy money for taking a small risk - it should be 10 years and $100,000 fine. This is hardly a deterrent. The director and writer seem single-focused on just one thing. That to portray poverty and hopelessness. But hardly offers a solution.

Melissa Leo is a wonderful actress - she has some excellent titles under her belt. Her acting in this is as expected - brilliant and powerful as the single mother trying to build a better life for her two kids and scraping by on a meagre wage. The comes along Misty Upham's character - also a single mother who is facing some challenges in her life. I really loved the fact that they used proper Native American/ First Nation actors and actresses in this movie - kudos to the Director and casting as everyone did a stand up job in their roles. This is Misty (RIP) at her finest. The chemistry between herself and Leo was tense, affecting and hit all the right notes.The scenery and setting - as bleak as their situation. As they struggled to improve their lives they were smuggling people who were struggling to improve their lives and the cycles of struggle for that perfect dream were grinding away. You will certainly not be dissappointed with this excellent indie!

The movie opens on a cold winter day—a few days before Christmas. We first see the face of a crying woman, Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), smoking a cigarette; her teeth are cigarette-stained and her faces is ruddy, almost malnourished. Ray is sitting on the front step of her single-wide trailer. One gets the impression that she is living from day to day. Ray is crying because her husband has just taken off with the all of the money that they had saved for a major payment on a double-wide trailer. He is a compulsive gambler and has taken off in one of their two old cars, leaving her and her two sons without any money. It soon becomes clear that this is not the first time he has done this and that neither she nor her 15-year-old son, T.J. (Charlie DcDermott), expects him to come back. Yet, she goes to the Bingo parlor in the nearby Mohawk reservation (between New York State and Quebec) to try to find him. With barely enough money to buy gas (and without the $5 entrance fee needed to get into the bingo place), she begs the woman taking the admission fee to let her go into the place to just look for her husband. She is not admitted. When she comes back to her car, she sees a young Indian woman, Lila (Misty Upham) driving off in her husband's car (which had been left abandoned with the keys in the seat).Ray follows Lila to her small trailer to get her car back. As Ray retrieves her car, Lila tells her that she has a friend who will pay $2,000 for it (more than it is worth---and without papers). Why? He is a smuggler who is always looking for cars with pop up trunks. Ray agrees to have Lila show her to the buyer, while showing Lila her gun and telling her that she is not afraid to use it if she has to. To get to the car dealer, they have to cross a wide frozen river (the St. Lawrence?—the St. Regis?) that divides the Mohawk reservation and serves as the border between Canada and the US. When they reach Lila's friend on the other side of the international border, he gives them $1,200 as two people are being into the trunk to be taken to the US. Thus begins the reluctant smuggling relationship between Ray and Lila with Lila supplying the contacts and Ray supplying the car with the pop trunk--as well as the fact that Ray is 'white' and police won't suspect her of smuggling across people the border. Lila and Ray make several smuggling 'runs,' with no two coming off the same. However, when the arrangement goes wrong, the consequences affect both women and families in an unexpected way. The story and characters are well-developed in this screenplay (written and directed by Courtney Hunt), and Melissa Leo's acting is well worth her Oscar nomination. Leo would eventually win an Oscar for her role in The Fighter (2011).

This really is mediocre. Melissa Leo turns in a fine performance, the youth actors are terrible...not their fault, the director obviously had no clue how to work with kids. It's a tear jerker...but why do we care? All the B parts are horribly stereotyped as are Native Americans visually it looks like an undergraduate student film ...I'm guessing shot on th Red One, but not well. The illegal aliens whose lives are torn apart are treated like detritus. I'm not sure why I even gave this a 3 except that I want to support low budget film making, but you can do low budget and still have relevance...so, I have seen worse, but this is pretty bad. Watch it only because you feel the need to identify with independent film.