The Border
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Movie Reviews of The Border
Movie Review: A courageous picture, a good dose of action balanced with human vulnerability
Summary: 3 Stars
THE BORDER (1982), with Harvey Keitel and Jack Nicholson taking on
the roles of US Border Patrol officers near Mexico, were optimal
choices for their individualism, charisma and proven crowd-drawing
capabilities to the theatres.
The theme touched upon - the trafficking of humans like cattle
across the border, and the poor conditions of aliens - is obviously
more than current even 25 years later.
Its strength is the immense realism and the battle between embracing
one's true character, doing what one naturally feels is the right
thing to do, (often in line with the law) weighed against the
struggle to please the boss, co-exist with existing "in loco"
corruption, and payoffs occurring in the patrol officer workforce. It
refers to wetbacks, pepper bellies, a 3 mile fence, coyotes, gourd
heads, etc.
Here, Nicholson is told to turn a blind eye to alien cargos delivered
to needy fruit and vegetable crop producers in the USA, and to
industrial base owners who rely on below minimum wage workers to
maximize profits. He is also told to accept as business taking out
independent and rival gang drug traffickers. There's holding a baby
for randsom in the form of an annuity. He has trouble in dealing with
all this, from his inexperience in life, prior training, and from
different behaviors required in normal police environments.
Keeping the lid on the jar of corruption is a tough job, parallel to
the actual work officers do, as Nicholson, Keitel struggle to keep
the money flows going between all interested parties, especially
themselves, and to their wives, who are phenomenal spenders ( such as
underground pool, waterbed, new home, etc.) who pile on them a
financial pressure without giving it any second thoughts. This is
critique on consumerism, of the affluence of American society. The
wife says " Don't worry about paying it back! I opened a charge card
account at the merchant" suggesting credit cards debt is not a true
debt.
Interestingly, Keitel quickly carries out a strategy to keep
Nicholson under his thumb, by framing him for manslaughter,
potentially charged unless the latter cooperates, and goes along with
total obedience to what the former describes as "real big money on
the table, how each must take care of their own, that something's
good is going on, because things are different down here, and the
need to sit on the right horse from the start."
The downside is the perpetuation of the stereotype of the illiterate
peasant Mexican, either on the take if a man, or a prostitute if a
woman, with others looking to live a new life in the USA. The cheesy
1970's era pickup trucks and clunkers are perhaps the only aspect
that makes the picture truely dated.
The best cinematography was obviously done in the outdoors,
especially action scenes filmed with a pleasing clarity, while the
indoor ones are suprisingly average, boorish. The true widescreen
aspect, however, is welcomed in either case.
The music oftentimes is wholly inappropriate, with Ry Cooder, playing
his acoustic traditional guitar, and other times, slide guitar during
action, or life-and-death sequences for example, suggesting a perhaps
one-trick-pony type of audio he's able to come up with, identical to
his Paris, TX colaboration.
Overall, BORDER is a courageous picture, interesting, with a good
dose of action and excitement, balanced out equally with mellow,
vulnerable human behavior that tells the tale of a struggle between
character and doing what's right against profit-minded, one-track
minded opportunists.
Movie Review: On the border
Summary: 3 Stars
Fairly average drama about the border patrol along the Rio Grande on the take while allowing illegal aliens across the border. One of them, Jack Nicholson, tries to do the right thing. Nicholson, who has been pressured by his prissy wife (Valerie Perrine) to get in on the takes, is finally disgusted by the whole thing and begins to help a young mother and her kids get into the US. It's all about corruption and the corruptible and the fine line between good and evil, but the movie has little depth as it probes these issues and is full of cliches. Not one of Nicholson's or Richardson's best efforts.Movie Review: Not a great movie
Summary: 3 Stars
I thought this was a pretty good movie but not a great one. I didn't find it memorable or anything that really got my juices flowing. Of course anytime you have Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel on the screen together it is something worth watching. Go into it with the expectation of just watching two really good and cool actors doing their thing earlier in their career.
Not a great movie but worth a look.
Movie Review: The broken promised land
Summary: 2 Stars
DVD has become the equivalent of the old late night double-bill circuit, the last chance to catch old movies on the verge of being completely forgotten like The Border. There were great expectations for this back in 1982 - a script co-written by The Wild Bunch's Walon Green, Jack Nicholson in the days when he could still act without semaphore and a great supporting cast (Harvey Keitel, Warren Oates, Valerie Perrine), Tony Richardson directing (although he was pretty much a spent force by then) - but now it doesn't even turn up on TV. The material certainly offers a rich seam of possibilities for comment on the 80s American Dreams 80s of capitalism and conspicuous consumption, with Nicholson's border patrolman turning a blind eye to the odd drug deal or bit of people trafficking to finance his wife's relentless materialism, until he rediscovers his conscience when he finds out his partners are also in the baby selling business. Unfortunately, he never really gets his hands dirty, barely even turning a blind eye before his decency rises to the surface. The film feels always watered down as if too many rewrites and too many committees have left it neutered and, sadly, the recent DVD release is a missed opportunity to restore the original, nihilistic ending where Nicholson goes over the edge and firebombs the border patrol station that was cut after preview audiences found it too downbeat but which still featured prominently in the film's trailers.
While that probably wasn't too convincing considering how low-key Nicholson's crisis of conscience is in the film, it had to be better than the crude reshot climax where the film abandons logic and even basic rules of continuity: at one point he's holding characters at gunpoint, then he's somewhere else and they're free trying to kill him, one character goes from injured at his house to hopping around like a gazelle on the banks of the Rio Grande while Valerie Perrine's character gets dumber on an exponential level. The villains of the piece are disposed of with absurd ease (and one impressive car stunt) in time for a clumsily edited happy ending and you start wondering if you somehow found yourself watching another film entirely. What makes it all the more clumsy is that the rest of the film is so flat and underwhelming that the sudden lurch into melodrama is all the more jarring. Unfortunately Ry Cooder's beautiful title song, Across the Borderline, says it all much more economically. But if you want to know the film's real crime, it's completely wasting the great Warren Oates in a nothing bit part. When even he can't make an impression, you know something's really wrong. All in all, all too easy to remember why I found this so forgettable.
The DVD has no extras - not even a trailer - but has an acceptable 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, although many night scenes lack detail.
Movie Review: Riddled with politically correct cliches
Summary: 2 Stars
Nicholson, here in his prime, delivers a good performance, but I think it far from his best. The rest of the cast includes some fine actors, but they are forced to behave as caricatures in the director's politically correct fantasy.
In what is basically a propaganda film, the good guys are angelic, while the bad guys can't even muster proper dental hygiene. The film has all the verisimilitude of an old episode of The Big Valley. Nicholson's is the only character with any semblance of complexity, and not much at that. There isn't another realistic character in the lot. After watching this polemic, who would ever know that millions of illegals -- more than a few of them my friends -- have come to the United States because opportunity is greater and life better? The idea that any illegal with all his wits was working, as the obligatory evil capitalist character says, for $6 a week, is a product of the Hollywood penchant for preposterous nonsense. I can't think of a single illegal among the many I've known who hasn't created a more secure and satisyfing life "across the borderline." You can bet that the scriptwriters, the director, and producer of The Border spent a lot of their time with illegals, perhaps most especially their maids.
Most offensively, the film is an insult to the illegals. The people who made this film had to have believed that illegal immigrants were imbeciles who didn't bother to learn anything about conditions in the U.S. before coming to the country, and then returning if they were caught and deported. None of this is to minimize the corruption and brutality of U.S. government border enforcement. A good film could have been made about that.