Friday
20Mar2009
Movie Review - 'Crossing Over'
Friday, March 20, 2009 at 1:39AM | Crossing Over
Starring Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta, and Ashley Judd  |
Immigration is a thorny issue with no quick, easy, or perfect solution. How do you juggle talk of a wall along our border with the promise of America? How do you keep everyone out when the Statue of Liberty asks for your tired, poor, and huddled masses? How do you stop immigration in a nation of immigrants?
Conversely, an approach that takes all comers has at least as many problems as the one that wants restrictions. Jobs, crime, medical care and costs, insurance, and overpopulation are some of the concerns that America faces after living with a fairly lax immigration policy.
Crossing Over tries to tackle the problem in two hours, which would be difficult to pull off if writer-director Wayne Kramer had kept his new film limited to one or two stories of illegal immigrants trying to find a way to stay in the country. Unfortunately, there are seven distinct but intertwined storylines, which could work if this were The Love Boat and the plot points were easy to establish and required little involvement with the details. But because Kramer does have seven stories, what sets them apart are their details, and there's just not enough time to do them justice.
Admirably, Kramer does not limit Crossing Over to immigrants heading north from Central America. There's an Australian actress (Alice Eve), an Iranian family and a Korean family near the end of their journeys to naturalization, a British musician (Jim Sturgess) trying to con his way into permanent residency, a Mexican laborer (Alice Braga) and her displaced son, an orphaned African refugee caught in the system, and an outspoken Muslim teenager, whose actions in school threaten to have her entire family deported.
Watch the Crossing Over trailer
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