Crossing Over: Thoughts (and Spoilers)

Last night, I watched Crossing Over, a movie about immigrants and immigration process. On the whole, it was a rather disappointing movie. It attempted to tie together several different intersecting storylines through chance encounters, but just came off as unbelievable and exploitative.

Perhaps the most exploitative and unbelievable storyline was that of Claire Shepard, a struggling Australian actress who is attempting to get her green card. Through one of those proverbial twists of fate, Shepard gets into a car accident with Cole Frankel, who just happens to be an immigration judiciary official, one of the people who can approve people's green card applications. Frankel essentially blackmails Shepard into a sexual relationship, in small part for the car, but mostly for her green card. The agreement of the relationship is that she is to be available at his beck and call whenever he pleases for two months. Shepard obviously finds herself haunted and tormented by this agreement, but what makes it so exploitative is that after this agreement is made, nearly every time we see Shepard, she's completely naked. The use of nudity is gratuitous to the extreme, and the storyline fizzles out when Shepard "gives up" Frankel for voluntary deportation back to Australia.

Another exploitative storyline is the one surrounding the Kim family, Koreans who are days away from their naturalization. The focus is on the eldest son, Kim Yong, who becomes involved with Korean gang members (ggangpae). There is no given reason for this. This plot distinctly lacks depth. During a planned robbery where "no one was supposed to get hurt," Kim finds himself as the only surviving ggangpae, as the others are systematically killed by Hamid Baraheri, an immigration official who, by yet another twist of fate, finds himself in the liquor store during the robbery. The two share a completely unbelievable dialogue about immigration and naturalization, and Baraheri lets Kim go. There are very few scenes with Kim and the Kim family, and almost all of them involve some form of violence. The story and characters had promise, but the story fell flat with too much violence and not enough focus on character development.

There are, however, a few moments in the film that are heart-wrenching and slightly more believable. The Bangladeshi Jahangir family has a very interesting storyline, involving a daughter who tries to see the 9/11 attack from another perspective, and the whole family pays the price. I wondered the entire time about the accuracy of this story; is it imagined reactions, or real ones? Have they put together various true stories to make this one? I have not been able to find that answer, but I will continue looking. If the entire movie was about this family, it would have improved. There was enough in the family dynamics and the situation for an entire movie, without the useless big names stars, i.e. Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta. The exploration of this storyline would be interesting to see, especially due to the fact that the parents and oldest daughter were illegal immigrants, but the two younger siblings are American-born. This dynamic could have been further investigated, considering there must be plenty of US residents who find themselves in a similar place.

The final storyline I'd like to put down is the one concerning the Iranian family, the Baraheris. There was gratuitous sex, murder and a cover-up involving the young daughter, Zahra. Farid, her older brother, discovered she was in a relationship with an older man, who was married with two kids. He decided, under his father's orders, to "scare them a little" by killing the two of them, and subsequently asking Hamid, the immigrations official brother, to help him cover it up. This storyline was nothing but a complete mess, with an utterly unnecessary sex scene, full frontal nudity and murder. The family dynamics could have been better explored without the sex and murder, and it would still have been a revealing exercise between American vs. Iranian cultural expectations/differences.

I'm going to stop here before I discuss the entire movie. Crossing Over was purely for shock value, and did not explore immigration issues as one might have expected. Instead, Crossing Over focussed primarily on issues the white people in the movie bothered to concern themselves with, which gave us the longwinded and unrevealing storyline involving Mireya and her son. On the whole, not a worthwhile watch, but interesting to see what Hollywood considers important issues in immigration.