BY TODD GARBARINI
Charlie
Smith (Jack Nicholson) is a bored man. Bored with his position as an immigration
enforcement officer in Los Angeles and bored with his eleven-year marriage to
Marcy (Valerie Perrine) in a Sunland, CA trailer park. When Marcy boasts of a
better life in a shared duplex with chum Savannah (Shannon Wilcox) and her border
patrol husband Cat (Harvey Keitel) in El Paso, TX, Charlie doesn’t exactly
protest the change in geography or transfer in job title. With all their
possessions strapped to the roof of their car, they are welcomed with open arms.
It isn’t long, however, before Charlie realizes not only the danger and utter
futility of attempting to stop the migrants from making a run for los Estados
Unidos regardless of the presence of the tortilla fences topped with barbed
wire. But some of his peers and superiors, particularly his boss Red (Warren
Oats), all have their own methods of dishing out “justice†for wayward
immigrants who don’t cooperate following sweeps.
The
Border is a lesser-known
outing by Jack Nicholson and penned by Deric Washburn of The Deer Hunter
(1978) fame. Mr. Nicholson made the film prior to and following the actors’
strike in the summer of 1980. Following his directing and acting duties in Goin’
South (1978), his yearlong shooting schedule on Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980), and his turn as Eugene O’Neill in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981)
for which he won an Oscar nomination, Mr. Nicholson was tired and looking for a
break. This need for relaxation seems to have influenced his performance here
as Charlie, a man who always appears to be on the outside looking in and never
connected to the action at hand. Marcy comes off as an obsequious shrill who
strives constantly to make her husband happy but is clueless to his
protestations even after she spends money like water (pun intended) that they
don’t have on things that they don’t need, such as a $1600 waterbed and a small
pool in their new backyard. Her notion of love is adolescent: a bizarre,
picture-perfect domesticity that simply doesn’t exist. Ms. Perrine portrays
Marcy with enthusiasm, and one cannot help but think of Karen Black’s Rayette
Dispesto in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) and her fractured
relationship with Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson). Charlie is genuinely contrite
after he slaps her for her well-intentioned but misguided consumerism, but he realizes
that his position in upward mobility is almost non-existent. It’s this very
circumstance that propels him to go out of his way to aid a young Spanish woman
named Maria (Elpidia Carrillo) who has made it over the border following the
death of her family at the hands of a massive earthquake. Maria knows heartache
and strife firsthand and wants a better life for her newborn baby and her
teenage brother Juan (Manuel Viescas), the latter of whom is killed following a
drug raid by border patrols who work thankless jobs for piss poor pay and who supplement
their income by being on the take. Cat will later defend his position to
Charlie by referring tacitly to these murders as their need to “take care of
businessâ€, a mantra echoed in cinema following the revelation of the Corleone
Family’s business model in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972)
and its sequels. During the argument scenes between Charlie and Cat, Cat holds
his own and there were times I expected him to fly off the handle like Ben
(Harvey Keitel) does with Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) in Martin Scorsese’s Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Suffice it to say, Cat eventually gets
what’s coming to him.
Elpidia
Carrillo is wonderful as Maria, giving a humanity to just about the only Hispanic
person in the film who isn’t depicted as a criminal, a drug smuggler, a human
trafficker, or even a baby kidnapper who turns out to a be a woman! She offers
to pay back Charlie with her body after he gives her money and is genuinely
confused when he declines. The theme of the commoditization of humans is ever-present.
The film’s ending falls flat, obviously the result of a test-screening
audience’s desire for a happy one, however it’s so “ABC Afterschool
Specialâ€-ish with very little emotional impact in a scene that truly should rouse
the audience to its feet, that it negates all that preceded it.
Directed
by veteran director Tony Richardson, The Border opened on Friday,
January 29, 1982 in New York to mixed reviews, with some comparing the film to
a melodramatic TV-movie and while there is a case to be made for that given the
lack of surprise and overall predictability of the film, it’s both Mr.
Nicholson’s and Mr. Keitel’s performances that makes it worth watching. This
was their first outing onscreen together followed by their collaboration on The
Two Jakes (1990) which Mr. Nicholson directed. The supporting cast is also
very good, with support by Shannon Wilcox as Cat’s wife, and its fun to see
Gary Grubbs, Dirk Blocker, and Lonny Chapman as part of the border patrollers. The
film’s roots are culled from a series of Los Angeles Times articles published
in 1979 and 1980 by Evan Maxwell who wrote extensively about the plight of
migrants attempting to escape from Mexico and the horrors they encountered. Forty
years later, the Trump Administration is grappling with the very same issues as
Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) makes sweeps of towns reputed to be
housing “illegalsâ€.
The
film has been released on Blu-ray by the fine folks at Kino Lorber Studio
Classics and they’ve provided a much-improved transfer over previous versions,
retaining the film’s Panavision framing and presenting the image with
anamorphic enhancement. Vilmos Zsigmond did some of the photography (as did Ric
Waite) and there are scenes that harken back to his work on John Boorman’s Deliverance
(1972).
There
is an excellent feature-length commentary by critic and author Simon Abrams who
speaks incisively on the careers of most involved and quotes many book and
magazine articles written about Mr. Nicholson and the film. In addition to this
supplement, there are four radio spots (two in English and two in Spanish, the
latter referring to the film as La Frontera), and theatrical trailers
for Kino Lorber titles The Border (1982), The Missouri Breaks
(1976), City of Industry (1997), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(1974), and The Hotel New Hampshire (1984).
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