Crossing Over (**½)

Directed by: Wayne Kramer
Starring: Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta, Ashley Judd, Jim Sturgess, Cliff Curtis, Summer Bishil, Alice Braga, Alice Eve
Seen: July 26th 2009

**½ Out of ****

Think on this for a moment: if you had very little to nothing to live on, minimum amounts of opportunity in life, a struggling acting career, or a family (however big or small) to take care of; any one of these, what would you consider doing or going through to live in the land of opportunity, the USA?

Crossing Over takes a look at the lives of various people who make/have made it their lives mission to live in America. There’s Claire (Eve), the young Australian actress who’s been in the US illegally for some time, Gavin (Sturgess), the not-so-Jewish Jew using the fact that he is from Jewish heritage to try to obtain a working visa, Mireya (Braga), the young mother who is deported without being able to take her son along and who is now desperately trying to get back onto US soil, the Baraheri Family, of whom the daughter was born American, and the rest are in different stages of naturalisation, the Jahangir Family, with two young American born children and an older, Middle Eastern born daughter, Taslima (Bishil) accused of possible terrorism, and the Kim family, also on the verge of naturalisation, but with a son mixed up with gang members.

On the other side of the coin there are agents Max Brogan (Ford) and Hamid Baraheri (Curtis), who work for Immigration as partners, and go on regular raids to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants. There is also married couple Cole and Denise Frankel (Liotta & Judd), Cole a sleazy and corrupt agent for the government, blackmailing young girls into sleeping with him in order to obtain the coveted green card, and Denise an immigration defence lawyer, working hard at finding suitable homes for those children who won’t be deposited across the border and also at keeping those families together if she can.

The stories keep on weaving across each other, but to nowhere near the degree of inter-linking significance we have seen in films like Crash and to a lesser degree The Rules of Attraction. The film is only partially effective, as it shows only glimpses of what it could have been, a much more emotionally enthralling study of suffering or difficulty and diversity in overcoming it. Some of the stories are surprisingly involving, while others do not really have the emotional impact director Wayne Kramer must have been going for. Speaking of, Kramer himself is a South African who has immigrated to the US, land of opportunity, and to land a film with this kind of cast is no small feat, offering, even though it is behind the scenes, yet another success story of someone who went to America looking for ‘it’.

The film leaves one major stone [mostly] unturned, and I inject the mostly because this stone is touched on in the background during the naturalisation ceremony near the end of the film. I believe the opportunity to tell even a little bit about the ones coming to America (or anywhere) expecting everything to just run smoothly and happen in their favour has been wasted. As a South African citizen, I understand a bit of the immigration problem, as, to put it frankly, South Africa is the small USA of Africa, and the influx of non-contributing illegal immigrants into South Africa is absolutely massive. But hey, maybe Wayne Kramer told exactly the story he wanted to. Even though it was not exactly what I was hoping for.