The Movie That Inspired Gregory Bovino to Join Border Patrol
For all the scenes of jeeps raising dust in the desert and migrants wading through the Rio Grande, “The Border” is something of a two-hander. Charlie’s prevailing disgust with his fellow-officers, most of whom all but openly take part in a human-trafficking operation, is sharpened when a young migrant from Mexico, named Maria, has her infant stolen while they’re being held in a detention camp. Charlie sets out to retrieve the child, even though doing so will put him at odds with unscrupulous men on both sides of the border.
Elpidia Carrillo, the actress who plays Maria, comes from Michoacán, and lost several of her family members to violence, she recalled when we spoke earlier this month. Carrillo began acting at twelve, but “The Border” was her first American feature. She would have to hold her own against Nicholson, who played the deranged writer Jack Torrance, in “The Shining,” and who had won an Oscar, in 1976, for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “I had no idea who he was,” Carrillo told me.
A peasant girl dressed in a canvas smock, Maria is mostly expressionless and mute, pulled to and fro like a dry leaf on a high wind. Aside from expressing her maternal instinct, she seems to have no will of her own, no capacity for sophisticated thought. Nor do the other migrants in the film stand out, the way even the most inconsequential white characters do. They are merely a mass of brown bodies, always in motion.
Carrillo took exception to this depiction, and told as much to the director, Tony Richardson, an Englishman. “The way you tell this story, this very humble woman, that’s just completely for you,’’ she recalled saying. “We’re not like that. We know our roots.”
“I was not happy to play that role,” she told me. Carrillo added that she didn’t think Bovino’s great-uncle, Hartley, liked her much. “He actually wanted another girl to play the role.”
Once, Carrillo said, Nicholson “playfully” tapped her buttocks in rehearsal. She said that she kicked him in return, and he lost his balance. (A representative for Nicholson did not respond to requests for comment.) When things settled down, Richardson approached. He told her to channel her rage about the role into her character. “That’s exactly who you are,” he told her. “You’re going to fight for your baby.”
In his posthumously published 1993 memoir, Richardson devotes several passages to Nicholson, whom he described as “meticulously prepared.” He lambasts Valerie Perrine, who played Charlie’s wife, Marcy, as “a difficult and needlessly bitchy and offensive woman to most of the people working around her.” (A representative for Perrine strongly disputed that characterization and said that “everybody who’s worked for her had high praise for her on sets” and that “she was very professional about her work.”) Carrillo is simply “an unknown Mexican actress,” in Richardson’s telling, whom he “found.”
Some of the most effective scenes in the film have nothing to do with the border. Charlie is at first working in Los Angeles, but Marcy persuades him to move to El Paso so that they can live in a two-family duplex with her high-school friend Savannah, who’s married to Cat. Soon enough, they are pulling into the driveway of the new house, in a bleak suburban subdivision wrested from the West Texas scrublands. Reunited, Marcy and Savannah perform a saucy cheerleading routine in front of their husbands, which ends with the promise of fellatio. Charlie laughs, but there is something like embarrassment, or unease, on his middle-aged, mustachioed face. Cat has no such reservations. “Charlie, I feel you and me have scored the best damn pussy in the whole state of Texas,” he informs his new colleague.
