The film's title is a play on the name of the child protagonist, Chris Cross (played by David Arnott). Chris is doing the best he can with an array of odd jobs to supplant his mother's meager wages. Tracy Cross (Goldie Hawn) has been abandoned by her husband (Keith Carradine), a Navy fighter pilot who was left mentally scarred by war atrocities he committed in Vietnam. Tracy dreams of being able to provide a modest home for herself and her son, but she's already working days in a restaurant and nights in a strip club and between that and whatever money Chris is able to scrounge up, be it from a paper route or pool cleaning, the best they can afford is a seedy hotel room. Then one day during one of Chris's odd jobs picking up fish from a shrimper to take back to the hotel restaurant, he discovers packaged cocaine stuffed inside the fish. Chris is a good kid and he's a bit naïve, but soon he concocts a money-making scheme that he hopes will jettison him and his mother out of their dismal orbit and on to a better flight path.
It's only a coincidence that CrissCross is set in the same year that Goldie Hawn won an Academy Award for her performance in Cactus Flower (1969). She'd already been famous for a few years before that and remained a big star for decades to come. More noteworthy is the fact that during the same year that Bird on a Wire (1990) was released (a film Hawn starred in with Mel Gibson that was a critical dud yet still went on to gross over $138 million dollars worldwide) she was working on CrissCross: a film in which she got to flex her dramatic muscles in a way that showed nuance and deeper layers than those of the effervescent blonde persona that had made her a box-office star. That this would be a passion project on which she is an uncredited executive producer makes perfect sense as she was surely hungry for a serious role.
Chris Menges, working from a script by Scott Sommer that is based on a novella also written by Sommer, is no stranger to the drug trade. Many of his awards are for television work, including documentaries that covered the subject of drug wars in other countries. The actor Arliss Howard, who a few years earlier made a strong impression as Pvt. Cowboy in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Robert Towne's drug cartel crime drama Tequila Sunrise (1988) gets added to CrissCross as a love interest for Tracy, albeit one with a secret that radically changes the dynamics of their relationship when things get bumpy between Chris and some unhappy drug dealers. Steve Buscemi also pops in for a small role. While Hawn, Carradine, Howard, and Buscemi all add celebrity cachet to a drama that moves from the travails of the working poor to more established tropes involving a fight with drug dealers, the focus is primarily on child actor David Arnott. He beat out 3,000 hopefuls in the open auditions to take on the role of Chris Cross. He provides an earnest performance that feels both authentic and vulnerable - perhaps too vulnerable, as this was both his first movie and his last.
By Pablo Kjolseth
