Replican’t

The only productive way to think about Crossing Over is to
see it as Blade Runner Part Two. To think of it in any other way
(through the filter of films like Crash and Traffic,
or as a 21st-century “problem film,” or as a part of the emerging yet
still-confused genre of global realism) will only bring destruction to
this weak work of cinema. It has nothing going for it but its strange
alignment with the universe of Deckard, Voight-Kampff tests, Nexus-6
replicants, and Tyrell Corporation and its postmodern Mayan
temple–esque 700-story headquarters in the dead middle of
downtown Los Angeles. The actor who connects Crossing Over,
which is sunny and set in the L.A. of today, to Blade Runner,
which is dark and set in the future of the L.A. of its day, 1982, is
Harrison Ford.

Let’s begin by being productive with Crossing Over (later on
we will have to be destructive, which is an easy thing to do with this
film). Directed and written by a South African, Wayne Kramer,
Crossing Over has at the center of its sprawling stories Max
Brogan, a melancholy veteran agent for Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE). Brogan is to this world of undocumented immigrants
what Deckard was to the world of replicants. In the former, illegal
aliens are trying to stay in America; in the latter, biological
androids are trying to stay on earth. In the former, the agent (an old
Harrison Ford) hunts, captures, and throws illegal aliens into
detention centers; in the latter, the agent (a young Harrison Ford)
hunts, captures, and executes replicants on the spot. Though he is not
a cold killer in Crossing Over, the old agent is as lonely and
as sad as the young agent.

Those who think that connecting Blade Runner with Crossing
Over is a bit of a stretch will change their minds instantly when
they see a scene in the second film that corresponds directly with a
famous scene in the first. It happens like this: In the third act of
Crossing Over, the ICE agent, old Ford, begins to investigate
the murder of an Iranian woman and her lover, a married man—they
were shot to death in a sleazy motel room. The crime is a mystery to
homicide detectives. A surveillance camera, however, captured the
activity in the motel’s parking lot on the night of the murders. To
crack the difficult case, Ford, with the assistance of an LAPD
technician, begins watching hours and hours of the camera’s footage.
When Ford suddenly spots something strange in the murky footage, he
orders the technician to stop the video—the image freezes. He
then tells the technician to zero in on a particular part of the image.
The technician clicks to that part. Ford then tells him to enlarge that
part. If at this point you cannot see the connection, then please stop
reading this review and go elsewhere. (I believe Paul Constant has an
intriguing review of James Morrow in the books section of the
paper—go there and read that.)

To conclude the productive section: Crossing Over is a
daylighted and humanized Blade Runner—an old movie that
takes place a decade from the Middle East strife, post-9/11 anxieties,
and postcolonial pressures that shape our day and the content of
Kramer’s new movie. And what the second film ultimately reveals is how
the first one failed to imagine an even more diverse Los Angeles. In
Blade Runner, there’s only one Mexican, no blacks, millions of
whites, and billions of Asians; in Crossing Over, every kind of
race thrives in the streets, motels, mansions, and detention centers of
L.A.

Regrettably, Crossing Over is not a good film. (Now we enter
the destructive section.) It tries to express the substance of our
global situation, but fails to give this multicultural/multiracial
situation more than one dimension. The characters are at once diverse
and flat. Not one of the stories (one involves a Korean boy; another, a
Nigerian girl; another, a Bangladeshi teenager; another, a Jewish
slacker and an Australian beauty; another, a Mexican woman—the
ultimate illegal alien) is strong or reveals something new or
unexpected. What Crossing Over exposes is the need for modern
cinema to find a filmic language or set of narrative codes that can
articulate the complexity of the multitude without sacrificing the
richness (or heaviness, or density) of the individual. That is the
challenge of our moment.