Modified Truths in ‘Crossed Over’

Hollywood has some peculiar ideas about re-creating real-life events for the screen. Rarely does the unvarnished truth arrive. Instead, it’s rewritten to fit some formula or to serve an agenda.

It comes as no surprise, then, that real events have been altered in the CBS movie “Crossed Over” (Sunday, 9 p.m.), about the friendship between Karla Faye Tucker, the pickax murderer who became the focus of international attention when she was executed in Texas in 1998, and Beverly Lowry, a mother paralyzed with grief after the hit-and-run death of her teenage son.

But the subtle attempts to de-emphasize Tucker’s role in a gruesome double murder--along with not-so-subtle anti-death-penalty messages larded throughout the movie--should give viewers pause.

Admittedly, such egregiousness is easier to overlook when the filmmaking is this fine. Diane Keaton turns in a nicely understated yet powerful performance as Lowry, a prim, well-put-together woman who becomes a shadow of her former self after her son’s death.

Opposite her, Jennifer Jason Leigh dissolves almost eerily into the role of Tucker, a tough young woman with a disconcertingly sweet face and newfound religion. Director Bobby Roth and cinematographer Eric Van Haren Noman find artful ways to frame their sometimes disturbing, sometimes poignant story.

But in spooky black-and-white flashbacks, Tucker is depicted to have played a much less active role in the killing of Deborah Thornton than she is documented to have had, and when her character is strapped to a table, arms perpendicular to her sides, to receive her lethal injection, she is photographed from overhead so that she looks like she’s being crucified. A topic as serious as the death penalty deserves a fairer discussion than it receives here.