Harrison Ford leads away Alice Braga in Crossing Over.
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Crossing Over
Starring Alice Eve, Harrison Ford, and Ray Liotta. Written and directed by Wayne Kramer. Rated PG-13. |
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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The Deported
Citizen’s arrest for tasteless immigrant drama.
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Haven’t we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer-director Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity that Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared. This time,the crudeness is (barely) concealed under a paper-thin plaster of Oscar-worthy self-importance.
Like the fictional New Jersey town that served as the backdrop for Kramer’s previous film, Angel City is for the filmmaker yet another disenchanted urban forest filled with innocent maidens (Alice Eve as an Australian actress trying to make it in Hollywood), big bad wolves (Ray Liotta as the immigration honcho who offers the Aussie a green card in exchange for daily anal sex privileges), and world-weary armored knights (Harrison Ford as the Immigration and Customs agent who never met a pretty illegal he didn’t want to save). Similarly traveling along their own bread-crumb trails are a baker’s dozen of black-, brown-, and yellow-skinned unfortunates on hand mainly to be crushed by the might of La Migra or squished under the steel-capped boot of post-9/11 racial profiling — which may nonetheless be preferable to the option offered by Liotta.
Crossing Over begins earnestly enough as an old-fashioned exercise in Stanley Kramer–ish consciousness-raising, with Ford wearing his existential angst on his sleeve as a callous colleague reprimands him, “Jesus Christ, Brogan, everything is a goddamn humanitarian crisis with you!” From there, solemn overhead shots of freeways and skyscrapers serve as the Scotch tape crudely holding together the movie’s myriad story lines. Lest we forget that white people suffer, too, an atheistic British singer-songwriter (Jim Sturgess) masquerades as an observant Jew in order to obtain his much-coveted “status.” Meanwhile, a Muslim teen (Summer Bishil) gives a class report in defense of the 9/11 hijackers then appears surprised to discover Homeland Security agents ransacking her bedroom. And an about-to-be-naturalized Korean youth (Justin Chon) resists indoctrination into the very street gang that Clint Eastwood surely just ran out of town.
But by the time we arrive at the serendipitous meeting between Liotta’s green-card gatekeeper and Eve’s Kidman/Watts aspirant, it’s clear that we’re firmly in Kramer’s typically lurid hands. Wouldn’t she prefer to steal away with him for an afternoon quickie, he proposes, rather than end up in a San Pedro detention center, where “some mamma Latina makes you her bitch for a couple of nights”? Well, now that you put it that way …
Never does Kramer encounter a cultural stereotype he can’t repurpose. For most of Crossing Over, Ford’s Iranian partner (played by New Zealander Cliff Curtis in a triumph of affirmative-action casting) glowers so contemptuously at his cleavage-bearing sister that when the girl turns up with a bullet in her head the only surprise is that it’s a mystery. Meanwhile, when Ford travels south of the border in search of the deported sweatshop worker (Alice Braga) who has captured his heart, I could all but swear that Kramer and cinematographer James Whitaker had slapped a brown filter on the camera, the better to emphasize the developing world’s pervasive filth.
And so it goes, with Kramer — who doesn’t really seem to like people very much — failing to muster even the superficial empathy that the makers of the similarly programmatic The Visitor and Rendition showed toward their own imperiled cardboard-cutout illegals. Eventually, all points converge in a finale draped in patriotic imagery employed for maximum irony, as Kramer haphazardly crosscuts between a naturalization ceremony and a deportation — not exactly The Godfather’s baptism by gunfire, in case you had any doubts.
There might be no more to say, were it not for the fact that Crossing Over once counted that paragon of liberal virtue Sean Penn among its ensemble before either poor test screenings or Penn’s own request — depending on which rumor mill you believe — got him excised. Reportedly, Penn’s story line involved a border-patrol agent who crashes his car and subsequently “crosses over” not from one country to another but rather from this world to the next. Minus that, Kramer’s film at least manages to clock in at just less than the two-hour mark. Praise Allah for that.
This story was originally published in L.A. Weekly.
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