BUY IT A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow From Bogie to Tarantino: AFI's top crime flicks Now Showing New video releases for June 30 Y E S T E R D A Y American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Fishers of men: Two offbeat TV talk shows reinvent the celebrity interview (06/29/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Heroine chic By Lori Leibovich Ally Sheedy talks about the hard road to "High Art" (06/25/98) Doctor Dolittle Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Eddie Murphy and talking critters have fun with barnyard humor (06/25/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor L.A. transcendental: The dark side of Hollywood's New Age (06/23/98) The X-Files Reviewed by Joyce Millman The movie fans have been waiting for is just a big tease (06/19/98) Mulan Reviewed by Jenn Shreve Disney's first heroic female protagonist battles Huns and gender stereotypes with equal valor (06/19/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

THE BROKEN PROMISED LAND | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - "The Border" takes dead aim at the senselessness of U.S. immigration policy, the hypocrisy of a country that has long preened as the haven of immigrants while deriving much of its prosperity from cheap, illegal labor and the endless back-and-forth dance between the border patrol and the "illegals." About the most compassion an honest border patrolman can offer is to wait until the illegals are out of the river before he arrests them (if he wades in after them, a co-worker tells Charlie, they'll hunker down to hide and get pneumonia). The corrupt officers won't even do that. They're raking in money ferrying illegals over the border to work as farmhands. Cat (Harvey Keitel), Marcy's girlfriend's husband, offers Charlie a cut of this home-grown slave trade, and Charlie at first refuses. But stretched tight by Marcy's expenditures on her "dream house," he gives in. What he can't stomach are the even dirtier dealings he stumbles onto. The Mexican hood who rounds up the workers for Cat and Charlie arranges for Maria's baby to be stolen from her while she's in detention. There's money to be made selling babies to childless American couples. The film unashamedly holds up Maria as an image of uncorrupted purity (and Carillo has the unaffected beauty to pull off this Madonna role). Charlie has seen her in the course of his patrols. To him, she's the single good thing in the whole crummy world he's landed in. "The Border" becomes the story of Charlie's determination to get her baby back. He knows he can't change the immigration policy, weed out the corruption in the patrol or guarantee Maria a life of happiness and prosperity. All he can do is reunite her with her child. When Charlie goes to visit Maria in her village to tell her he's arranged passage for her and her brother across the border, she begins to undress, thinking this is what he expects in return. "You don't owe me anything," Charlie tells her. "I wanna feel good about something sometime." The entire movie exists on this simple, straightforward level. The director, the late Tony Richardson, and the screenwriters, Walon Green, Deric Washburn and David Freeman, are tackling a big subject, but they never get preachy or grandiose. "The Border" is a tight, brutal action melodrama. Once Charlie has decided to retrieve Maria's baby, he has to face down his fellow border guards, including his boss (played by Warren Oates, in his penultimate film, as the embodiment of malignant authority), who are determined to keep their lucrative arrangement going. Richardson doesn't turn "The Border" into a revenge movie. The violence here is sudden and horrible; there's no elation when the bad guys get it. That's part of what keeps the story of Charlie's quest to redeem himself from falling into sentimentality: Even doing this good deed, he can't extricate himself from the ugliness around him. As Charlie, Nicholson gives the least heralded major performance of his career. There's none of the mugging or grinning he's come to rely on. And Nicholson gets at the sadness of a man waking up to the regrets he's come to take for granted and determined not to add to them. Charlie becomes aware of his capacity for decency, but because of all the crap he's swallowed, he denies himself the luxury of thinking of himself as decent. This is the sort of performance that makes you respect the choices of the actor as well as the character he plays. If anything unites the characters in "The Border" it's that each acts as if the American Dream is there for the taking. What they do to realize it becomes the movie's litmus test. For Cat, it's providing a (materially) better life for his family. He never makes the connection between the son he's providing for and the children he's stealing or selling into slavery. For Charlie, the Dream is the simple chance to "feel good about something sometime." The movie's final shot -- Maria and Charlie standing together in the middle of the Rio Grande -- has the deep, becalmed beauty of a Pietà. Only the American flag waving in the background, as elusive and high as the catch in Freddy Fender's voice, tells you that nothing is settled. It may look like a dream, but it's no mirage. SALON | June 30, 1998  Charles Taylor's video column, Home Movies, appears in Salon every Tuesday. - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available June 30 ] Amistad Wag the Dog The Replacement Killers Different for Girls