Crossing the Bridge

Crossing The Bridge is a 1992 drama that follows three friends struggling with life after high school who get made an offer that's hard to refuse.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and one that most don't seem to know about. It might not be high on the radar, but it's a fantastic film about three friends, who are stuck in the past and don't really know what the next step in life is. The cast is outstanding with great performances from Josh Charles, Jason Gedrick, and Stephen Baldwin. The story is simple but completely intriguing with good characters that pull you in and keep you interested. It's a movie that takes a hard look at how the decisions we make can affect the rest of our lives.

I absolutely love this film, and if you've never seen it before, I would definitely recommend checking it out.

I remember watching this movie in English class, during my senior year of high school with great fondness. I sat next to my best friend and we loved every moment of this movie. As I sit here and think about it now, I realize that our appreciation for this film had probably very little to do with the fundamentals of good movie-making (ex: acting, direction, musical score), but can instead be attributed to the fact that it displays friendship in one of its purest forms. The film is an illustrated test of loyalty, and what being friends as an adolescent is all about. It made me appreciate my best friend that much more, and in the end, I left class feeling a little bit better about being a kid.

This is a coming of age movie written and directed by Mike Binder. As with much fiction, and especially movies that are framed by the later perspectives of a participant narrator (here one of the principal characters, Mort Golden) I expect that Binder's creation is to a considerable degree autobiographical, and I see that he was in fact born in Detroit and would have been just a few years younger than Mort.

Set in Detroit in 1975, it features Mort and two close friends from high school, all aged about 21, and of very different personalities but united by their common situation: largely rootless and morally adrift in a decadent urban environment (that extends across the Ambassador Bridge into Canada), and still driven primarily by the testosterone that nature has presumably bestowed on the male sex to ensure that the community has a sufficient supply of young warriors to defend it. However, there is no functional community here, no adequate fathers in the picture, and no organizational structure like the military draft to discipline and direct the easily provoked aggressions of these young men, and to provide them with a recognizable path to adulthood. So instead they are drifting gradually into a life of crime.

It has been said that the primary imperative of society is to tame young men. In support of this proposition, the vast majority of crimes of violence are perpetrated by young men, principally of the ages of 17-25. Mostly these are crimes of impulse, and in the absence of skills and planning they often result in run-ins with the law or its surrogates, or alternatively with hardened criminals for whom the young men are no match. These experiences can be sufficiently painful to shock them into the beginnings of maturity, but fortunately, one way or another, the vast majority of young men do survive and one way or another find their way out of this potential or actual criminal phase of their lives. Scientific research has found that the brains (and therefore the psyches) of young men are generally slower to mature than those of women, slower in particular to establish the impulse control that the frontal lobes crucially feed back to our underlying emotion-drived animal brains, our core selves. Whether this delay is a direct consequence of the much higher testosterone levels that all biological males have compared to all females, or whether it just the testosterone speaking for itself, hasn't, to my knowledge, been established.

These general remarks are meant to elucidate the themes and backdrop of this movie, which, as I write, is grossly under-rated on IMDB at 6.3. I expect that this is in part because these three candidate musketeers are for most of the movie quite unlikable, and the milieu they inhabit is grungy and decadent. Then too, the movie is the conventional hetero male equivalent of a "chick flick", so probably lost some ratings points by viewers who weren't able to relate.

But the characters and their lives are real and believable, and if the dramatization of their story is largely an exercise in literary and dramatic realism, it is nonetheless effective, has the ring of authenticity, and in place of the conventional happy Hollywood ending, concludes on a satisfyingly hopeful note.

1970's Michigan- Mike Binder's "Crossing the Bridge" is such an effective encapsulation of that time and place that you might have to check the credits to make sure this movie wasn't made in 1975. This film was among my favorites as a teenager and has a tone that's somewhere in between All the Right Moves and the string of Coppola/SE Hinton films of the early 80's. Stephen Baldwin (in his best performance), Josh Charles, and Jason Gedrick, are three suburban Detroit buddies two years removed from high school. The dynamic and dialogue between the three actors superceeds the plot, none of which I will give away here. All in all, this is a great movie with an intangible quality that cements it the category of my all time favorites. Definately one to check out.

Decent coming of age story about three guys (one is a thug) who learn the value of doing the right things in life even if it's inconvenient. I watched it solely because a couple of my favorite wrestlers were in it though I didn't know how long their part was or what their part was. I knew it would be bit parts since they were listed in the credits as Senior # 1 and Senior # 2 or something like that. They were Jerry Lynn and Sean Waltman. I was right about their roles. They were small but what disappointed me was that they were two of the pioneers of extreme style wrestling and instead of being asked to use their talents they (well, Jerry)...got the crap beat out of him. Sean jumped on the back of the guy doing the beating but poor Jerry even got his face smacked into the fender or bumper of a car. Now I know he seems to thrive on pain in the ring but that is ridiculous! Maybe that was his first experience at ECW (extreme championship wrestling.)

A side note is that one of the lead characters, Mort, looked very familiar. He portrayed Knox Overstreet in a similar movie that was infinitely better, Dead Poet's Society. That film basically had the same message. It's time to grow up and take responsibility for your actions. That's a message I do promote.