Movie review: Crossing Over

by John P. Meyer

Director Wayne Kramer made one of my favorite all-time caper movies: 2003's The Cooler, which played on the coolness of star William H. Macy while he was at the peak of his post-Fargo coolness.

Kramer's latest is a kind of Crash-wannabe mish-mash called Crossing Over, which attempts to show how illegal immigration issues cross all ethnic and racial boundaries (well, a good few of them, anyway), while at the same time playing on the lingering (though increasingly more weather-beaten) coolness of Harrison Ford. Kramer also wrote the screenplay.

In a prime example of the lack of imagination exercised by the casting department, Crossing Over finds Ford playing a conscientious, good-hearted (now, there's a stretch) ICE field operative, while veteran villain Ray Liotta essays the range-extending guise of a sleazebag blackmailer. WHAT THE!?!!? If that weren't enough, pixie-eared Ashley Judd portrays a sympathetic case worker who's kind to children.

And the surprises just keep on coming.

Sad to say, the plot points, too, seem mostly by the numbers, as a variety of Mexican, Jewish, Korean, Palestinian, Iranian and Australian immigrants all struggle to make their way to legal status as SoCal-based U.S. citizens.

Stringing this uncritical mass together is the Harrison Ford (Max Brogan) story line, which finds our hero the butt of agency jokes due to his overly-humanistic approach to rounding up and processing sweat-shop illegals: he actually considers them to be people rather than prey, and follows up with holding facility personnel to learn the medical status of those who seemed ill going in. (What a loser!) Naturally, Max's experiment in turning a blind eye to someone in need - at the urging of his jaded and suddenly eagle-eyed fellow operatives - ends up bringing down a passel of doom, as a single mother named Mireya (Alice Braga) disappears into the coyote-controlled border crossing underworld.

(Mireya's young son Juan, meanwhile, briefly becomes Max's ward as he strives to undo the damage his uncharacteristic act of negligence has done.)

The most preposterous of the numerous subplots (which will eventually string themselves together, per the Crash reference) involves a high school-aged Palestinian girl named Taslima (Summer Bishil, who really gets to exercise her crying skills in this one). For no reason other than righteous indignation - and, perhaps, an interest in placing herself firmly on the U.S. Government's top ten deportation hit list - Taslima delivers in front of her class an essay about how she understands why the 9/11 hijackers did what they did - and how their efforts to attract attention to their cause proved pretty dang successful, by golly.

This brand of counter-culture posturing might play in Peoria (though probably not), but it soars like a lead balloon over Taslima's L.A. public school classmates, who basically boo her out of the room. (It's one of them or their parents, presumably, who mentions to Homeland Security that they might ought to have a look at this young lady's residency status.)

Meanwhile, the comely Claire Shepard (played by the comely - and frequently totally starkers - Alice Eve) is a struggling actress who runs afoul (and we do mean foul) of the aforementioned Mr. Liotta's character, an immigration caseworker named Cole Frankel. Frankel offers Claire a deal: he'll overlook her policy transgressions and work toward the acquisition of her green card if she'll sleep with him. Repeatedly. Whenever he wants. They negotiate and settle on a three-month performance run.

There are at least three other story lines going on to stage left, right and center - including that of the sweet little African girl befriended by Denise Frankel (Ashley Judd); and the sad tale of the rebellious sister (Melody Khazae, as Zahra) of Max's expatriate Iranian partner Hamid (Cliff Curtis), who finds herself up against the unyielding wall of family tradition - but I'll only elaborate on that of transplanted Korean teenager Yong Kim (Justin Chon).

Yong finds himself having drifted into the collision-prone orbit of a street gang who are planning to rob a neighborhood food store as soon as the time is ripe - which it ends up being precisely when Max's partner Hamid wanders into the place immersed in a self-destructive homicidal funk. (Oh, the coincidence! Kind of like that part in Crash where... eh, never mind.) As the guns are pulled, Hamid goes all cold and deadly, like William Munny in Unforgiven or John Bernard Books in The Shootist - the bullets whizzing by simply don't phase him, allowing him to deliver his potent little pills right on target.

Aargh - I almost forgot to mention one of the film's cleverest bits (because it's embedded within so many other extraneous bits), which involves yet another (heretofore unmentioned) character - an immigrant of Jewish heritage named Gavin (Jim Sturgess).

Gavin is, in fact, an atheist who hasn't been to shul since his boyhood. But when he discovers that the likeliest means of securing citizenship is to play the Jewish card, he feigns devoutness. The adjudicator assigned to his case (played stern and skeptical by Terence Bernie Hines) calls in a rabbi (Roger Marks) who happens to have been waiting in the lobby to see whether Gavin can daven his way into full citizenship. Will the rabbi go along with Gavin's baldfaced ruse? (I'll never tell.)

The point of all this is that - I guess - this whole immigration issue is bloody complicated, and affects people's lives in unexpected ways, like ripples on the pond of humanity. Or something similarly profound.

If you already realized that this is the case, then you might want to just save yourself the 113 minutes you might have spent watching this well-acted, though essentially unsurprising (and thus unsatisfying) drama.

By the time Max Brogan goes back to business as usual on sweat shop duty, we're fresh out of sympathy - and interest.