THE IMMIGRANT CRISIS BOILS OVER IN CROSSING OVER
Immigration problems in the United States appear insoluble in Crossing Over, directed by Wayne Kramer, who has expanded his 1996 short film of the same title into a full-length drama. Rather than focusing on political options on a grand scale, the film features a variety of dilemmas along with efforts of individuals to navigate the perils, mostly unsuccessfully. Short cuts begin by portraying diverse individuals trapped in the system, but they gradually come together until a final scene in which several hundred are sworn as American citizens. The venue is Los Angeles, the complexity of which is typified by aerial photographs above the vast freeway system albeit without ground-level views of 24-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic. The Department of Homeland Security is the chief villain. When the film begins, there is a raid on a garment factory and roundup of illegals, including Mireya Sanchez (played by Alice Braga), whom agent Max Brogam (played by Harrison Ford) is about to overlook when a fellow agent insists otherwise. She desperately informs Brogan that her young son needs to be rescued from becoming an orphan of the state, so he first tracks him down and returns him to grandparents in México and later tries to fish her out of the cesspool of detention centers. One of his colleagues, Iran-American Hamid Baraheri (played by Cliff Curtis), is meanwhile trying to save his enterprising, libertinistic sister Zahra (played by Melody Khazae) from participation in a scheme from providing false documentation cards with her Mexican-American boyfriend, but the caper goes awry, Zahra is found murdered, and his brother Farid (played by Merik Tadros) is hauled away from the citizenship ceremony in handcuffs. Without giving out any more spoilers, the other subplots involve two green-card seekers from Australia, a Korean immigrant teenager succumbing to gang peer pressure, a Saudi high school student whose class paper is misinterpreted as pro-jihad, and a preteen African girl held in detention without a mother. A Homeland Security official, Cole Frankel (played by Ray Liotta), meanwhile, has sex with an illegal behind the back of his spouse Denise (played by Ashley Judd), who defends illegals caught in the merciless system. Among previous films on the plight of immigrants, Crossing Over is perhaps the best in stating the realities of differing immigrant lives and easily could have been based on true stories. MH