Crossing Over

Illegal immigration is a hot-button issue in the U.S. right now, inciting emotional responses from both sides. It's the perfect time for a thoughtful film on the topic, and Crossing Over, which was came and went without a sound last year, is certainly thoughtful. I think it is also weighted down by its solemnity.

Reminiscent of Crash, the Wayne Kramer film is a quilt of stories about a wide variety of immigrants, both legal and non. Harrison Ford is a immigration officer who has the misfortune of having an conscience. After a raid on a clothing manufacturer, a young Mexican woman pleads with him to see to her child; he ends up driving the boy all the way back to his grandparents in Mexico. His partner (Cliff Curtis), an Iranian, is celebrating his father's naturalization, but is ashamed of his sister's slatternly behavior.

Elsewhere, an Australian would-be actress (Alice Eve), her visitor's visa expired, ends up prostituting herself for a green card to a sleazy official (Ray Liotta). His wife, Ashley Judd, is an immigration attorney, who gets involved with a family of Muslims who are threatened with deportation when their teenage daughter writes a paper expressing sympathy for the 9/11 hijackers.

There's a lot going on here, and that doesn't include a young Korean boy who is pressured to join a gang of criminals, and a British musician, Jim Sturgess, who tries to get a work permit by feigning being a Jewish scholar. May of the characters end up intersecting, a la Crash, but unlike that film there's less of a singular purpose. Kramer seems to be throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, and without the light touch he exhibited in his much better film, The Cooler.

But there's some daring writing in Crossing Over. I've always suspected that much of the hatred of illegal immigrants is racial in nature, but this film does look at blonde, blue-eyed immigrants like Eve as being part of the entire picture. Her story, as sickening as it is, doesn't match the story of the Muslim girl (Summer Bashil), which brings up the issue of the Islamic cultural center and the Islamophobia it has inspired. Instead of depicting her as a peaceable Muslim, Kramer takes the ballsy approach of introducing her while she's reading her paper before the class, her head covered, and indicating that while she doesn't condone the actions of the hijackers, she understands. She is shouted down with epithets, and frankly, if I were a high school student, the xenophobic part of my brain might be inflamed. It reminds me of films about the blacklist era in which an innocent person is falsely perceived as being a communist--why not go all the way and make the character an actual communist? The reaction to Bashil as a character--is she sympathetic or not--give this film some badly needed juice.

Crossing Over is an admirable and intelligent film, but it was missing something. I know Crash is largely reviled by certain film fans, despite its Oscar win, and while I agree it was overrated, I thought it was still pretty good. That film had a sense of magic about it in having the characters wander through the landscape, but Crossing Over, despite a few moments that highlight unexpected compassion, lacks that.