A filmmaker’s portrait of human conflict
It’s a shame that Tony Richardson, one of the great British film directors of his time, was never fully seen as such. A Taste of Honey gave him valuable clout in the movie world, while his double Oscar win (Best Picture and Director) for Tom Jones further catapulted him to even greater acclaim. Both films, as well as other celebrated titles such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and The Hotel New Hampshire, showed his ability to craft compelling motion pictures, each one as diverse the last, but almost pale in comparison to his real talent as a storyteller. When looking at some of Richardson’s more complex films, it’s the recurring theme of the individual’s struggle of trying to exist in a strange land that makes up the basis of some of his most compelling work. Laurence Olivier’s desperate song and dance man trying to stay on top in The Entertainer and Robert Morse’s young poet who finds himself working in a Hollywood funeral home in The Loved One both offered portraits of people struggling to find their place in a world almost alien to them in a way. Richardson perhaps took this theme furthest with his 1982 drama The Border, in which the outsider filmmaker did what he was best at: exploring the world outside of himself and showing everyone what he saw.
Richardson’s film sees Jack Nicholson star as Charlie Smith, an up-and-coming border patrol agent whose status-conscious wife Marcy (Valerie Perinne) is just thrilled at Charlie’s new post (and pay increase), patrolling the border between Mexico and California. Under the guidance of corrupt agent Kat (Harvey Keitel), Charlie finds himself abusing his post in a variety of ways, not least of all by turning a blind eye to some of Kat’s illegal activities. However, when a young mother named Maria (Elpidia Carillo) has her baby kidnapped, Charlie finds himself in a kind of conflict he never expected to be in.
I’m sure there were some in the industry who must’ve seen Richardson as being a bit too explicit with the way he illustrated on the screen the worlds he saw, given the fact that he was an outsider in virtually all of them. The Border is certainly no exception where its up front nature is concerned. The world in The Border is one where most who exist in it are blind, whether they know it or not. Charlie’s life with Marcy is a maddening one in that the two exist in completely different wavelengths. She knows what his job title is, but doesn’t know exactly what he has to face everyday, beyond just the base facts. Instead, Marcy’s life consists of just wanting to craft the perfect suburban existence for her and her husband, figuring that whatever Charlie has to face everyday will be worth it for the life they’ll eventually attain. It’s only when she comes face to face with Maria through unforeseen circumstances that the emotional weight of what her husband is forced to exist in everyday begins to sink in. If Marcy doesn’t want to acknowledge the dark side of living by the border, choosing instead to live in ignorance, the people Charlie faces at the office find themselves happily absorbed by it. The Border shows how corruption exists on both sides of the fence. Kat’s underhanded deals, which include trafficking and murder. mirror those of a shady man named Manuel (Mike Gomez) with the right documentation to come and go as he pleases (indulging in illegal activities on both sides). Both men enjoy similar levels of power thanks to their unique and distinct levels of position among the people they encounter. Kat with his badge and gun and Manuel with his suit provide the right kind of “sheep’s clothing” with which to make the border their own. Manuel, Kat, and Marcy all signify the different sides of life on the border, and the levels of complicitness are different between all of them when it comes to contributing to the dangers of the area. For them, it’s just the way of life. For Charlie, it’s nothing short of maddening.
Looking at Charlie, it’s easy to see a man caught between two worlds. There is the world he shares with Marcy that is slowly becoming more burden than haven thanks to her desire to rise up the ranks in their new neighborhood. His encounters with her at the end of every day can’t help but intensify as he falls deeper into the underside of his work, with Maria’s plight to get her baby back and his wife’s seeming inability to comprehend how its affecting her husband. He struggles with what he thought it would be like vs. what it actually is. When he leaves the house, Charlie plunges into a world where people are risking their lives for the smallest chance at a better life and where the people they meet are looking to not only stop them, but in some cases to profit off them. The symbol of lawfulness and justice might not have been something Charlie considered himself to be when he took on the job. There is the idea that Charlie was banking on a certain level of detachment when considering what his work would entail. Yet when first becoming privy to Kat’s dirty dealings and his disregard for the actual justice entrusted to them, Charlie retaliates. If his retaliation starts out as a form of self-preservation, it becomes something deeper when he realizes what has happened to Maria’s baby. We never get a full sense of who Maria is as a character, and maybe its for the best since Charlie doesn’t either. But he doesn’t have to. His willingness to risk everything, including and especially his life, brings forward an empathy embedded within him which he never thought would factor into what he believed would be an essentially cut and dried job. But The Border surprises Charlie and the audience by showing him to be a character struggling to decipher his own opinions, moral stance, and what he believes to be right.
Richardson may not have reached the levels of legacy that Martin Scorsese has already achieved, but the filmmaker had such an undeniably effective way of understanding the power of the medium, as evidenced by the quality of his efforts. There’s a sort of finality to The Border when looking at its director and the era in which he made it. For one, the film was one of the last loose-narrative efforts left over from the previous decade, where plot oftentimes came a distant second to character and the overall social experience. Secondly, with only two subsequent features to his name (the aforementioned Hotel New Hampshire and the Jessica Lange/Tommy Lee Jones love story Blue Sky), The Border was the last time Richardson would take audiences on a character’s journey as stark and vivid as this one. Today The Border would be written off by modern film audiences as playing hopelessly into the white savior/undeserved redemption vein, which has garnered plenty of criticism in recent years. But The Border is not so easy to dismiss as one would think for the simple fact that it’s not a movie which tries to educate, but rather explores a scary and unknown terrain to uncover the humanity at its core. It’s a feat that’s accomplished both honestly and poetically by a director who knew exactly how to do it.
The Border is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.