Review of Crossing Over (2009) by Paul Z — 01 Oct 2009

The American Dream, and the eagerness to dwell without restriction in the U.S., is something for which people are prepared to pursue tirelessly, die, forfeit their families, acquire criminally, take for granted. We absorb much of time talking about the American Dream and have too much distrust of those who want to live it. Wariness toward foreigners is so easily asserted even among the privileged that you'd think they all came here for the gratuities and handouts. This canvas forges a collage, too condensed to be sure, of a fresh influx who came here with copacetic intentions and will be beneficial residents if they get the opportunity. Most of them will anyway. Some were in need of repair at home and have not a pleasant sail.

I had an idea, but not the whole idea of just how hard it is to gain U.S. citizenship. It is difficult to settle in this country legally and likely ill-fated to do it illegally. That's why I theorize we get some remarkable first-rate arrivals. It takes backbone, zeal and savvy to get into the United States either way. Many of those who arrive want to better themselves, and on that course, they will better us.

Dealing with the border, document fraud, the asylum and green card process, work-site enforcement, naturalization, the office of counter terrorism and the clash of cultures, this ensemble drama bums the formula of Crash to weave interlaced narratives about various incomers, their issues and their families. All of their lives interlock in some way, if only through U.S. immigration officials. Crash fashioned its structure quite instinctively, even if it didn't do its contrived dialogue the same favor. Crossing Over appears to draw pretty tight, with too many characters, too many plot threads and too much of an exertion to touch all angles. We face immigrants both recent and settled, both legal and illegal, from Mexico, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, England, Korea and Australia. It seems like a catalogue. Overtly a message movie, it is thus often contrived and so then often formulaic. There are interesting thoughts provoked by particular scenes, but often the characters involved in them are pawns representing ideological extremities. Nevertheless, it suggests a humanist approach to the issues it presents.

The joining constituents are two immigration officers, played by Harrison Ford and Cliff Curtis, who are perfect for their characters; an immigration go-between played with bold venality by Ray Liotta, and an immigration defense attorney played with Ashley Judd's audacious gallantry. The parables feature a Mexican woman divided from her child in a bust; an Iranian family, much ingrained, which is about to be naturalized; a Muslim teenager who brings an FBI investigation by reading a forthright, though valid, paper about 9/11 in class; a Korean teenager who is being squeezed to align with a Korean gang; an Australian would-be actress; an atheist Jew from Great Britain who postures as a teacher whose function is required at a Hebrew school, and a little Nigerian orphan who has been marooned in a holding center and will be sent back to Africa and peril.

Some of these stories are intriguing and some are emotionally powerful, but together they feel too forced. It's too systematic how they coalesce, like the traffic on freeway interchanges seen in overhead shots that break up the sections. I was quite juiced up by Ford's entanglement with Alice Braga's Mexican woman, who is taken away, begging him to reclaim her child from the baby-sitter. He plays a good person whose inner voice won't let him forget. And there's more to it than that. It's an uphill battle for him to keep his work at work.

Harrison Ford provides the steady axis in the story, but occasionally it becomes so improbably overemotional, we're sidetracked. Ashley Judd's character supplies comprehension in the manner in which our legal system treats immigration, and Alice Eve's Australian actress shows what she is ready to do for Liotta's unethical official, who happens to be Judd's husband. There is a foil between an Iranian father who thinks of himself as a good Muslim and a daughter played by Summer Bishil who thinks of herself as a good Muslim and a good American.

Director Wayne Kramer has made two films previous: The Cooler, an uninhibitedly sexual, star-fueled gambling drama which has an offbeat view of being sweeping in scope and simultaneously zigzagging, so that while we ride the face of the story, unforeseen turns are unfolding behind it; and Running Scared, an ultraviolent multi-ethnic action thriller with the very same kind of comprehensively epic structure, and a spectrum-mixed visual tableau that yet still has a flavorfully dingy glaze. He reminds me a bit of Richard Kelly, writer-director of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, whose stories are swollen with deep pockets of peripheral goings-on that either throw it all out of balance or create the ultimate epic he imagined. Yes, Kramer's third film is far from perfect. If you're looking for credibility and defy artifice, you might be against it. But sometimes movies are fascinating, in spite of their ultra-indulgence, and you want to keep on watching. This one, as like his other films, and Kelly's, is like that.