Parental misguidance: Mother and Child

Now in her early 50s, Karen (Annette Bening) still lives with her mom, a reticent woman with vacant eyes, housebound and it seems not long for this world. Karen works as a physical therapist for the elderly. We know Karen had a child at 14 whom she gave her up for adoption. We hear the maudlin unsent letters Karen still writes to this daughter she never knew, and we sense that there’s something terribly sad about this woman who forfeited her opportunity to care for a child so that she could spend her life caring for the aged. Karen is socially impaired, lonely, angry, and wears dumpy clothing. She’s unkind to her housekeeper. Still, she’s weirdly sympathetic. You wish her the best.

Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) by contrast has turned her own difficult, controlling nature into something of a social asset. She’s a reputable lawyer, fiercely independent, without any familial ties, very self-assured, beguilingly attractive, sensual without sentiment. She’s seduces her not-easily-seduced new boss (Samuel L. Jackson) in a heartbeat, and nabs her dopey married neighbour as a side dish. It’s no mystery that Elizabeth is Karen’s daughter, and the fact that they both inhabit Los Angeles, that they both inhabit this movie, conspicuously titled Mother and Child, prompts us to speculate how they’ll eventually reunite. That such expectations are never fulfilled in any sort of obvious or predictable way is a testament of sorts to the storytelling skills of writer/director Rodrigo García.

But García’s feats of plot-twisting slight of hand also constitute all that’s finally most frustrating and annoying in Mother and Child. Much like the work of its executive producer, Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the movie betrays it’s finer qualities in an over-extended final act riddled with blasts of dramatic irony that feel as contrived as so many earlier scenes feel honest, thoughtful, and highly attuned to the peculiar and unnerving ways we negotiate our relationships. There’s a third storyline here, involving Lucy (Kerry Washington) and her attempts to adopt a child, and the presence of this seemingly unrelated thread should, I suppose, be a major tip-off to the sort of Paul Haggisy, too-neatly tied-up ending we’re slowly moving toward.

The restraint exhibited in certain exchanges between characters, exchanges that often resemble interrogations, is striking. The bits of dialogue whittled down to the bone, sometimes down to simple declarations, are intriguing. Editor Steven Weisberg has an immaculate sense of when to exit a scene, which is to say he always leaves as early as possible, yet never too soon. The performances are uniformly inviting while never being ingratiating. Bening and the exceptionally perfectly cast Watts are never more watchable than when seemingly trying to push others away. Jackson, in bow-tie and glasses, with graying beard, and Jimmy Smits, who plays a cuddly, baffled love interest for Bening, are effortlessly endearing in their inability to resist these pushy, off-putting women, the sort of flawed but resilient mother figures who form the core of García’s world view. There’s so many appealing aspects to Mother and Child, so many items to lure us in, that the over-calculated series of last act revelations, all timed to go off in rapid, numbing succession, to ostensibly give the audience its big emotional release, become a major let down even if you see them coming a mile away. I just lauded Weisberg for his judicious trimming, but there’s one additional cut he could have made that might have saved the whole movie, one that would have occurred right at the end of that scene were Watts drops off a letter at the adoption agency, the scene that assures us that everything is changing, when there still remained a balance of ambiguity and conclusiveness in keeping with all that’s most eloquent and memorable in Mother and Child.

Over the border and into the bathos

Crossing Over features a cross-section of characters figuratively situated on either side of the US border, people who either want in, want to stay, or want to determine who makes the cut. You’ve got your Mexican mom illegally cranking out textiles for a few bucks to fund a better life for her little boy. You’ve got your affluent Iranian family with its soon-to-be naturalized patriarch and daughter turned black sheep on account of assimilating too fully into the Western model of feminine independence. You’ve got your Chinese family, the parents humbly coveting citizenship while their punk kid scoffs at such a legit entrée into an American dream he’s figured is available only to the Tony Montanas of the world. You’ve got your naïve Islamic teen apologist for the 9/11 hijackers persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech. You’ve got just about everything you could think to throw into a movie about the overwhelming morass surrounding US immigration. Everything except a rounded character, a single plausible scene or even a coherent polemic.

Hopping around Los Angeles to follow several characters as they cross paths and slide into detours, Crossing Over is earnest as all hell, ostensibly muckraking, dramaturgically strangled, and deeply mawkish. In other words, it’s the new Crash—there’s even an actual car crash that brings together, wouldn’t you know it, someone trying to get a green card with someone who approves green cards! So lovely young would-be Aussie starlet Alice Eve winds up screwing shameless old bureaucrat Ray Liotta in a motel room, but at least she cries in the shower afterwards. Meanwhile senior migra Harrison Ford goes on a private crusade to protect an abandoned child and immigration lawyer Ashley Judd has to deal with aggressively moronic feds who go ballistic over militant Islamic chat rooms found on annoyingly self-righteous Summer Bishil’s computer. The pervading dumbness reaches its spectacular nadir in a convenience store robbery gone wrong where, after splattering three kids brains all over the walls, Cliff Curtis, in a scene he’s surely praying future-employers will soon forget, delivers a monologue about how becoming an American constituted the greatest moment of his life to a crybaby twit pressing a loaded gun into a terrified innocent’s woman’s skull. It’s so unintentionally funny it’s not even funny.

Writer/director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), a South African who doubtlessly has some first-hand knowledge of the issue at hand, apparently wants to tell a story about the masks we wear and compromises we make to get by. Perhaps the fundamental problem with Crossing Over is that for so much of the film masks are about all we see. Despite the efforts of a few of the better actors, these characters are crude types, overwrought mouthpieces for a grossly over-calculated scheme. Nothing feels natural, so nothing resonates. Images of crying kids are milked to death. Bizarrely, given the context, the sex and violence feels gratuitous. Bishil’s one victimized facial expression grates. Good intentions only make the whole thing more frustrating to sit through. I’ll say this for Kramer: at least his ambitions are to provoke viewers to reconsider what it means to be a patriotic American. Still, you should see The Visitor instead.

Missed opportunities: The Edge of Heaven skates along the edge of excess

At the start of two of it’s three chapters, Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) does a couple of very curious things, each highly emblematic of the movie’s underlying spirit. Firstly, with, happily, no ‘spoiler alert’ warning anywhere in sight, the chapters in question are titled so as to unambiguously announce the climactic death of a central character. Secondly, they depict the arrival by plane of a coffin from another land. In one coffin lies the remains of a Turk killed in Germany, in the other a German killed in Turkey. As the stories of the coffin’s contents are revealed, this morbid foreign exchange program proves to be riddled with potent themes of dislocation and misunderstanding, intolerance and intergenerational breakdown.

There is certainly no mistaking the ambitions toward profundity and timeliness invested here. Neither can one say that intense emotions have not been shaken to life to make it all happen. Yet as I watched The Edge of Heaven I could never quite shake off the sense that no single pursuit was being served so arduously as that of what is finally kind of a cheap and, these days, over-extended device: dramatic irony, that indispensable tool for many an ostensibly important, dramaturgically overcooked movie of our new century. From Crash (2004) to Babel (06) our most literal-minded liberal filmmakers have been trying to show us how, in the age of globalization, everything is connected, and they convey this by, well, literally connecting everybody in their movies, as though the audience is entirely incapable of making such connections on their own. Akin’s latest isn’t quite as overbearing in its approach as the above high-profile examples, as he endowing certain scenes with a genuinely affecting level of intimacy. But it’s this very intimacy that instills our viewing experience with that much deeper a sense of betrayal once the writer/director’s heavy hand enters the frame.

In one strand of The Edge of Heaven we see Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a retired widower, fall in serious like with Yeter (Nursel Köse), a spunky 40ish prostitute. Both are Turks living in Germany, their common national heritage filling in a few of the gaps in their very different backgrounds and sensibilities. Ali convinces Yeter to quit the racket and come live with him as a kept woman he can screw whenever the wind’s in his sails. She’s got a daughter back home to support. She surely doesn’t get off on hooking and probably wouldn’t mind escaping the muttered threats of the neighbourhood fundamentalist Muslims who broodingly disapprove of the work. So she agrees. But things, as they will, get more complicated.

In another strand Yeter’s daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), a young, aggressive political activist, flees Turkey, hoping to find her mom in Germany. She finds instead Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a student who becomes smitten by this rough-edged foundling and takes her in—even if Lotte’s mom Susanne (Fassbinder veteran Hanna Schygulla) isn’t all that cool with the interracial panty party going on under her roof. Yet Susanne’s wishes for Ayten’s expulsion come alarmingly true once Ayten’s sent back to Turkey and imprisoned, followed by lovestruck and hell-bent-on-justice Lotte.

The third chapter wrangles both threads together, thanks in part to the very handy link of Nejat (Baki Davrat), Ali’s son, who over the course of the film gives up his academic career in Germany to rediscover his ethnic roots, taking over a German bookstore in Istanbul. The Edge of Heaven slips in these shots here and there to provide a few big a-ha! moments of missed opportunity, before finally building up to the climax where solace is to be found in the knowledge that in the end, tragedies at least have some meaning once their trajectories are unearthed.

But in the search for solace, here too Akin, for my taste at least, tries a little too hard than is strictly necessary to generate catharsis, with scenes of prolonged, agonized weeping one might characterize as the pornography of the middlebrow moviegoer. There’s a point where emoting transcends empathy and becomes simply alienating, and Akin crosses it and some. I know of course that some people really go for that stuff, which may go some way to explain the film’s avalanche of awards. But such accolades may also partly result from a collective desire to see a dream come to life, one where even the most oppositional hostile forces might unite into a patchwork brotherhood, a united Europe founded, as is often the case, in bloodshed.