Release Date: February 27, 2009

(out of 4)

The multi-ensemble intersection drama "Crossing Over" is scattershot with contrivances but strong on hard-edged authentic dialogue. Yet another L.A. story with a social message purpose, this film concentrates on illegal immigrants and the process to earn green card citizenship as seen through the tribulations of Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Bangladeshi, Korean, Japanese and Chinese families. You got Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd as the star power with each of them playing characters who are immigration officials.

Harrison Ford is the top name in the cast but for perhaps the first time in many years he is not the primary character – nor are Liotta or Judd – but part of an ensemble which gives equal screen time to minorities. Writer-director Wayne Kramer (“The Cooler”) deftly lays out the episodes that involves a Mexican factory worker deported without her child, an Islamic high school girl who empathizes with the 9/11 hijackers that brings trouble to her family at home (she defends that her class presentation viewpoints was misunderstood), a young Bangladeshi woman whose non-traditional liberation causes revolt within her family, a British musician learning Hebrew for the sake of a green card, an Australian actress forced to prostitute herself, and a young misguided Korean teen inducted into a gang.

Many of the portrayed families are seeking to assimilate themselves into Western culture but are impeded by road blocks of one kind or another. Road blocks in the figurative sense, that is. Judd’s character, an immigration defense attorney, is caught up in two different subplots that are imbued in the compassionate. First, she is drawn into the case of an orphaned Northern African girl held a detention center with limited prospect of being adopted and so she considers becoming a surrogate mother. Second, she takes on the case of the Islamic high school girl whose oral essay at school not only violated the Patriot Act that issues her removal from school but also jeopardizes her parents’ residency in the States.

Judd’s character is a liberal crusader – and certainly the film as a whole is making a sympathetic plea to hard-pressed illegal immigrants – but the film also is testing the subject of bureaucratic misconduct. Judd’s husband is played by Liotta, a wormy applications adjuster who reviews immigrant cases applying for a green card. The script knows applied citizenship procedures very well as demonstrated in the dialogue when Liotta describes how applicants with “special talents” are favored foremost in earning U.S. residence. Wormy, and perhaps dirty, is the best way to describe Liotta who blackmails a striving Aussie actress (Alice Eve) into sex outside of his marriage for exchange of helping her fudge her application.

Most sympathetic – if dramatically over-strained – is Ford’s concern with an abandoned child whose mother is deported back to Mexico. The child is under the age of 10 with no guardian, and little English language ability, and Ford wants to do right by reconnecting the boy with his mother. Ford is playing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, and if the film has any top-drawer visual excitement, they are the scenes of the ICE raids into factories exploiting illegals for cheap labor. The ICE makes immediate arrests and detainments for deportation, and the camerawork of enforcers chasing after and tackling runaways has a certain visceral kick. Perhaps the tackling tactics of the ICE is not something to be condoned, but visually it elicits a certain compelling charge that collects your attention. This act of people herding is the least favorite part of Ford’s job (he’s a sensitive and tolerant person) although it’s the most favorite part for his violence-craved colleagues who like all the bone-crunching.

This is a film that contains many interesting scenes (and a few bad ones) but more importantly they lead to dramatic pay-offs of characters making big decisions that stem out of their complicated predicaments. A misplaced murder plot could have been discarded – it’s one plot strand too many – but most of the elements fit in a “Crash” style way, but done without the preposterous coincidences. Yes, this particular reviewer thinks that the honest density of the characters’ problems and the vibrancy of the dialogue makes “Crossing Over” a better movie than “Crash.” This film, with its occasional torn agenda, might have trouble finding an audience (it could turn out to be the lowest grossing Harrison Ford movie ever) but it is a film that has merit and could possibly draw discussion, or heated arguments between liberals and conservatives. That makes the film worthwhile as long you enjoy argumentatives. Opens in limited release on February 27th before expanding into a wide marketplace.