Crossed Over

It's a TV movie and has to be rated as such. I don't go along with the negative comments - it had to be underplayed. It would have been boring and clichéd if the actors had started chewing the carpet (not that Texas jails have any carpets). It was good to see George W. and his hair making a cameo appearance, in a familiar role. My only reason for writing to you is to question the unbelievable 'special' billing credit given to Jennifer Jason Leigh. How was this arrived at? I understand that sometimes the name needs to be under the title to give the actor a chance of a 'best supporting' award. But 'and'? This was as much a two - hander as Thelma and Louise or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The excellent and reliable Maury Chaykin was, well, excellent and reliable as the husband, but his role was never one that could push a central character into third - or not even third - place. So, I don't know. I really don't. Maybe Ms Leigh got all the money, in which case I have no complaint. John Carty.

Based on her novel, Beverly (Diane Keaton) and Ethan Lowry (Maury Chaykin) lose their son in a hit and run incident. Beverly can't accept his death unsolved, and it puts a great strain on their marriage. She's a novelist interviewing Karla Faye Tucker (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She befriends Karla and works out her own personal issues.

These are great actors in a TV movie. There isn't much of a plot. The interview in the prison isn't that dynamic. It's all depending on the actors putting life into these characters. They do their best, but there isn't enough for them to do. JJL does a good job. Keaton is emoting everything in her arsenal. The problem may be that this is a Beverly Lowry movie rather than a Karla Faye Tucker movie. KFT is the more compelling character. I also don't care for the black and white flashbacks with testimonial voice overs.

True-life account of a Texas novelist who, having acquired an obsession with death after the hit-and-run killing of her teenage son, begins an unlikely friendship with a convicted murderess on Death Row awaiting execution. While I agree with the general criticisms that this TV-movie is underpopulated and one-sided, and perhaps not completely true to the facts of the case regarding uneducated prostitute/drug addict/killer Karla Faye Tucker, its sole objective is uncover the bond between the two women involved--not to be an investigative journal of the crimes. In fact, the black-and-white flashbacks involving both the past histories of Diane Keaton's Beverly Lowry and Jennifer Jason Leigh's Tucker are the film's weakest link. The present-day relationship is the real story; there's another version to be told, yes, but Lowy's connection with the doomed Karla Faye is the focus this time, and it's quite moving. Comparisons to other Death Row films ("Dead Man Walking" in particular) aren't really useful here because the scope of the drama is much smaller (perhaps due to the constraints of a television budget). However, the emotions and tensions are just as raw and vivid, and Keaton, who had been giving mediocre performances for years before this, turns in a solid job. Director Bobby Roth tries hard to be graceful and balanced, occasionally slipping into second-class melodrama yet really involving the viewer in these lives. Karla Faye Tucker was not a good-girl-gone-bad, she lived a savage life, but the attempt is to bring out the humanistic characteristics in the woman who, on the eve of her demise by lethal injection, touched a few lives by chance. Worth-seeing.

The only noteworthy part of this film is that it shows Karla in a different light that the warm fuzzy cuddly Karla that was in the interviews with Larry King and others. Evidently, she acted a bit different when the cameras were off. Or it could have been that most attention was focused on her after her conversion, and not before.

According to the story by Lowry, she had just lost a son to a drunk driver who was never caught. So, wondering what kind of guilt this person may or may not be feeling she looks for a criminal to talk to, and finds Karla. And this is 3 years before the media attention. And the two women become "pals." I have nothing good or bad to say about this film except that Leigh, who seems to do an excellent job of capturing the persona of Karla Faye, looks nothing like her and this sort of spoiled everything for me. All and all the story gives a different insight, perhaps one that people did not get to see as much. She was rude, bad tempered, and also not very smart.

One of the most telling moments was when she tells the story about how she taught her Mom how to shoot drugs, because she really loved her Mom and did not want her do do it wrong and possibly kill herself. Hmm, I guess it should be remembered that Karla, unlike other monsters, was not a serial killer but someone who made a stupid decision after a giant binge on drugs and was quickly caught thereafter. I guess I just think it's too bad that she could not have met some more of the right kind of people before all of this happened, but it seems that her world was like an alien planet compared to most of ours.

Leaving aside the tired and seedy clichés of the death row genre, which this film wallows in, and the unpleasant evocation of the crucifixion, this film is just plain inaccurate, a bit-part player's parasitic exploitation of her tiny role in a bigger story. What is missing is more important than what is here. Where is the female victim's brother who was a regular visitor and friend to the murderer? Where is Newt Gingritch, where is Pat Robertson? Both actively campaigned for commutation of the death sentence. Where is any mention of the key Larry King interview given two weeks before her death? The overwhelming impression is that this woman had one source of support and friendship, when the reality was very different. It can't even get right the nature of the barrier in the visitor's room, or the marriage-by-proxy, opting instead for the romantic death row ceremony.

This is a movie which enjoys its misery, a pornography of redemption and death. If the book has the same tendency to self-promote at the expense of the truth, then the movie is true to the book. And then neither are true to the facts.