“Everything about her is a red flag.”
“Only when viewed through the distorted looking glass of your own paranoia.”
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The writing is not excellent in Crossing Over, out June 23rd from Alliace Films. The dialogue is, at times, jarringly silly in its attempt to be smart. However, there are moments when the movie is pretty smart. Just not enough of them. There is just too much going on in this film for anything to be really compelling. There is an Korean kid who gets involved with the local gangster thugs (which was explored fully, and done much better, in Gran Torino). There is a Muslim honour killing, an illegal Mexican immigrant woman trying to get back into America to take care of her son, a musician pretending to be Jewish to get his green card, and an actress forced to sleep with a bo-toxed up Ray Liotta to stay in the country.
Then there is Harrison Ford, who plays an immigration federal agent who sympathizes with the people he is forced to capture for deportation, Ashley Judd who is an immigration lawyer who wants to adopt a young girl from a war-torn African country (and RayLiotta’s wife), and a girl who writes an essay about the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 and gets investigated by Homeland Security, which could lead to her deportation and that of her family.
Unfortunately, this is just too much. Very few of the situations resonate, because they are spread far too thin. The only story line that really works is that of the young girl who wrote the 9/11 essay. Even then, her story is just a series of what-comes-next. She gets reported to the police by the school principal, who doesn’t understand the essay and thinks she might sympathize with the terrorists. The cops turn it over to Homeland Security, who bust into her house and search through her room to find evidence of that sympathy to meet their pre-conceived notions that she is a threat. Although they can’t find anything with which to prosecute her, they can deport her. And her family must decide if some of them will stay in America, if they will all go with her, or if they will let her go back alone.
That story line works mostly because of some terrific acting on the part of the girl who plays the young Muslim woman. (I believe her name is Summer Bishil, but there are so many characters that I’m not 100% certain who plays whom.) Also poignant is a scene where a Mexican immigrant (Alice Braga) begs Harrison Ford, the immigration officer, to look after her child. But it is too little in a movie that features immigrants from Australia, Korea, Nigeria, England, Mexico and other countries, then tries to tie them all together tangentially, in the style of Crash. I liked Crash, in that it was a pretty good meditation on racism that was tied together in a seemingly effortless way.
Crossing Over does not tie things together effortlessly. In fact, this movie smacks of one thing more than anything else - effort. There is a scene where Harrison Ford’s partner, played by Cliff Curtis, happens to end up in the convenience store that is being robbed by the gang with the young Korean kid. Curtis is struggling with his own Iranian family, his rebellious sister and their overbearing father. He recognizes something of himself in this kid, and…I don’t know. The whole scene is just so forced I couldn’t bring myself to care about this shoehorned connection between the two characters.
Also terribly forced is the connection between Ashley Judd (a lawyer representing the Muslim girl who is also trying to adopt the Nigerian girl) and her husband Ray Liotta, an adjudicator who is blackmailing the crazy-hot Australian actress Claire Shepard (Alice Eve) into having sex with him in exchange for a green card. The whole connection is so tenuous and forced that I just didn’t care about (or even like) any of the characters. I think that in the whole movie, I only really liked five of the seven hundred characters. And three of them were children.
Claire could be a compelling character. She really appears to have no choice but to submit to this disgusting relationship with the gross bo-toxed Ray Liotta. And Alice Eve spends a large portion of this movie naked. Very naked. Which is nice, but useless in the end. She comes off as pretty callous and sleazy herself. But played right, this particular interaction could have been a movie all on its own. So too could the story of the Korean kid (oh no, wait, it was in Gran Torino), or the story of the Iranian family and the rebellious daughter, or the story of the British musician (Jim Sturgess) pretending to be an uber-religious orthodox Jew. And especially the story of Harrison Ford and the Mexican woman, which is compelling for a few seconds here.
But unfortunately, all these stories are not given much time, therefore none of them have much depth, and the movie’s parable about immigration is lost in the superficial nature of the seventy-eight stories. For those who want to see a good movie about deportation, immigration and heartbreak, check out The Visitor. Actually, that one was far better than good - it was magnificent. Crossing Over is just a laundry list of immigrants who have trouble with green cards and meet in convenience stores. And it’s contrived and tedious.
