Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Jack Nicholson is at his best playing a burned-out border patrol officer in a small Texas town.
Jun 30, 1998 | Over the credits of 1982's "The Border," Freddy Fender sings "Across the Borderline," a song written for the film by Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and Jim Dickinson. The lyrics tell an old story.
There's a land
So I've been told
Every street is paved with gold
And it's just across the borderline ...
And when you reach the broken promised land
Every dream slips through your hand
You'll lose much more than you ever hoped to find.
Fender (nee Baldemar Huerta) was 45 and six years past his last Top 40 hit when he sang that song. He had lived a version of it: years of playing the Tex-Mex circuit and a stretch in prison before a brief taste of mainstream success in the '70s. But you don't need to know that because the story of dreams that persist despite being dashed again and again is all there in Fender's high vibrato. Only the worst kind of cynic would think that the dream he envisions in this song is a lie. The streets of gold exist for Fender because he's seen them, walked on them. He knows what it costs to even imagine seeing them again ("You pay the price to come this far/Just to wind up where you are"), and yet he won't give up that hope.
The American Dream is so familiar a notion to us that perhaps we're ready to dismiss it entirely as propaganda. That's the way it's been used, the way it will be used this coming Fourth of July weekend by commentators and politicians. In "The Border," it's dreamed by immigrants and citizens alike. This movie is the story of Maria (Elpidia Carrillo), a young Mexican woman who tries again and again to cross the Rio Grande into Texas with her infant son and her 12-year-old brother. Maria and others like her are picked up by the border patrol, processed and sent back across the river to await their next chance.
"The Border" is also the story of Charlie (Jack Nicholson), a man who's joined the Texas border patrol hoping to lose the crummy feeling that had grown on him like lichen during his years as an INS agent making futile busts in L.A. sweatshops. Charlie has seen the sweatshop owners go untouched while he arrested a few hapless workers to meet his quota. He knew they'd be back in the same jobs in no time. He takes the Texas border patrol job at the prodding of his wife, Marcy (Valerie Perrine, in a note-perfect caricature of cheerful, mindless consumerism), whose version of the American Dream is purely material, no more than a new house in a planned suburb and the cheap furniture she fills it with. What Charlie finds is a job that feels more futile than the one he left behind and a racket that makes him feel dirtier than he ever imagined possible.
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