Crossing the Bridge

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.

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.

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.

Such a classic Morty. I feel like he continues the existence of weak little men named Mort. For that they were spot on.

Unsure to the fullest.

Bridges have always been symbolic of transitions, whether from a major to a minor key, from Canada to the US, or from adolescence to adulthood. This film is about those transitions. It seems that all men have stories about when they `came-of-age', about the person they were then and about the friends they shared their lives with. This is another of those films.

This one had a particular resonance for me, as it's set in Michigan in the mid 70's. I lived in Michigan in the mid 70's and have been across the Ambassador Bridge many times. It was also interesting in that I had just seen `Threesome' in which Josh Charles plays a character in love with Stephen Baldwin's character. Add to that, the great songs of the period, that brought back so many memories and the unexpected appearance of David Schwimmer in an early minor role and this was an unexpectedly enjoyable movie experience.

If stories about young men coming of age and becoming the person that they will later be are enjoyable to you then I can highly recommend this movie.