Crossing Over
Directed by: Wayne Kramer
Starring: Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd, Ray Liota, Cliff Curtis, Summer Bishil, Alice Braga
Rated: R for pervasive language, some strong violence and sexuality/nudity.
Parental Notes: This is not a film for children — the violence is sparse but graphic, and the underlying themes are aimed at adults.
“Crossing Over” is a powerful drama, provided you are willing to engage it on its own terms. The people in its interweaving stories make some bad decisions and it’s easy to take a step back and mock them, but if you are willing to see their humanity and the rationales behind those poor decisions, their stories are touching.
The tales of “Crossing Over” feature people of every age, race, and country of origin. The tales intersect in unusual ways, looping over and around each other like the long, winding freeways of Los Angeles, where most of the action takes place. The unifying thread is the drive people feel to come to the United States, and their struggles to stay here. Many of the immigrant characters in the film are in Los Angeles illegally, but not all of them, and some of the citizens working in the immigration system are corrupt, but not all of them.
The big names in the film are Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd, and Ray Liotta. Ford plays an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent named Max Brogan, a good man overworked and on the edge of burning out. He gets caught up in the case of a young woman deported to Mexico whose young son is left with nobody to look after him. Judd’s character is Denise Frankel, an immigration lawyer whose clients include the family of a teenager whose essay on the 9/11 hijackers gets her arrested. Denise’s husband is played by Liotta at his slimiest: Cole Frankel is one of the folks who approves or denies green card applications. When he meets a lovely young Australian actress desperate for a green card, he has no qualms about cutting a deal with her — a deal that involves her meeting him in seedy hotel rooms whenever he wants for two months, in return for a green card.
Where “Crossing Over” falls short is in the simplicity of the characters. Of course, that is partly a function of its length — to fully develop the eight or so individual stories would require far more than the 113 minutes of this feature film. It’s hard to have much depth when you only get fifteen minutes or so of screen time.
But that simplicity allows these characters to be something more than just characters — they are avatars for the hundreds, even thousands of people who have similar experiences every day. It’s easy to dismiss those who come here illegally as criminals, job-thieves, or whatever the latest insult is, but the characters in “Crossing Over” have much more humanity than the statistics on the evening news. The tears the young woman sheds when she realizes that her essay means she may never see her family again are far more moving than a few dry sentences in an immigration article in the newspaper.
“Crossing Over” will not convince anyone to abandon strongly-held anti-immigration beliefs. It does, however, offer a sympathetic portrayal of the things people will do out of desperation. Sometimes those things work out, sometimes they don’t. The film doesn’t offer solutions, just an overview of some of the problems with our immigration system, and the way those problems impact the lives of ordinary people.