Release Date: Feb. 27
Director: Wayne Kramer
Writers: Wayne Kramer
Cinematographer: Jim Whitaker
Studio/Run Time: The Weinstein
Company, 140 mins.
Crossing Over, the new film from
writer-director Wayne Kramer, highlights what was good and what was
bad about Paul Haggis’ 2006 Oscar winner Crash. Haggis told
us that Los Angeles is a haven for racists, and Stacy Peralta told
us, in Crips and Bloods, that it’s essentially a gang town,
and Kramer gives us a third version: Los Angeles is the land of
illegal immigrants. You’d think that since these views overlap a
fair bit, they might all acknowledge worlds beyond their own myopic
perspectives, but Kramer’s sweeping aerial shots imply that he’s
giving us a total picture, just like Peralta’s carved up maps and
Haggis’ recurring ironies wove dubious Californian quilts of their
own.
Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd and Ray
Liotta are just three of the many people in Crossing Over
whose lives revolve around the fates of struggling immigrants. Kramer
has cherry-picked someone from every continent, except Antarctica,
and tasked each one with representing a shallow version of the twisty
path toward naturalization.
In Crash, Haggis seemed willing
to sacrifice insight for entertainment, jacking up each scene until
it spun ironically off its axis or screeched at the top of its lungs.
And then, having smashed Humpty Dumpty with a baseball bat, he tried
to put it all together again with tearful turnarounds and magical
snow. But through it all, he entertained, if only through sheer
surprise.
Without that same flair for
showmanship, Kramer’s Crossing Over feels somewhat more
sincere but also a fair bit less compelling. It’s no more
insightful about immigration than Crash was about race
relations, but it’s filled with the same kind of serendipitous
meetings and hackneyed clichés. The stories are third-rate
tearjerkers built around characters with perfectly pure hearts or
perfectly malevolent impulses. Harrison Ford bleeds for each illegal
he comes across (which gets in the way of his job as a veteran
enforcement officer) and childless Ashley Judd wears a big golden
Africa quite literally around her neck. Might the story put a
beautiful African girl in her life and send the child’s real mother
conveniently off-screen? I’m not tellin’.
The film plods along with frequently
swelling strings until late in the game when it suddenly turns into a
Judaic comedy, then a Peckinpah shootout, and then a Murder She
Wrote mystery, the latter resolved with three nested flashbacks
by a filmmaker with a markedly unimaginative sense of cinematic
storytelling. With these bursts of drama Kramer is likely trying to
draw lessons from similar films, but he doesn’t display the chops
required for something pulpy like Crash nor the depth of
thought required for something prismatic and awe-inspiring like The
Wire. Crossing Over isn’t a terrible film, but it’s a
terribly inconsequential one, a film that asks us to care about
characters we barely know and weep over situations that Kramer, by
all appearances, barely understands.