Review: Crossing Over
If Wayne Kramer’s “Crossing Over” were to inspire a game called the Six Degrees of Immigration Woes, what would be the shortest path between two of its biggest stars, Ashley Judd and Harrison Ford?
Let’s see, Judd plays Denise, an immigration lawyer who endures a sexless marriage to paunchy green card bureaucrat, Cole (Ray Liotta). Cole crashes his car into Claire, a pretty young Aussie actress who has overstayed her visa in a desperate attempt to launch her Hollywood career. In fact, a moment before the car crash, Claire was putting a down payment on a triptych of fake IDs at a print shop. Ford’s partner’s sister works at that print shop. But even if she didn’t, the shop would still be of special interest to Ford — he plays Max, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
As Kramer weaves this “Crash”-like web of interconnected stories in present-day Los Angeles, he manages to cover an annoyingly wide range of skin color and visa types.
Max leads a raid which takes a young Mexican garment factory worker and single mother away from her son. A culturally confused Korean teenager, whose family runs a dry cleaning business, can’t quite match his parents’ appreciation for the naturalization process and falls in with an Asian gang. Denise aches to rescue a sweet little African girl stuck in an INS detention center while her mother dies in a hospital a world over.
Of AIDS, no doubt.
All this serendipity and drama is designed to tug at our heart strings, but the plot is so burdened with characters who must explain their complicated predicaments that nothing save powerful shocks of violence and sex can defibrillate this hunkering juggernaut.
Cole strikes a lurid deal with Claire, trading papers for two months of sex, “whenever, wherever” he wants. And immigration status is vaunted like an elusive high. “I’ve got to get legal. You’ve got to get legal,” Claire says to her British boyfriend, who’s trying to conquer the U.S. as the next John Mayer.
Why don’t they both just make a brief foray into Canada?
“Crossing Over” chugs on with its bevy of contrived moral quandaries and a hugely exaggerated sense of its own value and importance. Its more experienced actors deliver tired, lackluster performances as its younger cast members shine, undoubtedly eager to nail their melodramatic lines and prove that they can cry on cue.
Only the viewers are left well-bruised from being beaten over the head with cultural stereotypes and obvious, overblown and cheap histrionics.
