Complelling Picture Adressing Important Subject Matter

Rating: 10/10 (16 August 2005)

Crash is an incredible film and an important one.
The film concerns an ensemble of characters from diverse backgrounds, different racial origins, different class in society and different life experiences. The film follows no particular plot as such but instead cleverly intertwines the many subplots of its various characters and how the directly or in-directly touch each others lives, for better or for worse. Before I move onto the subject matter, it is important to point out that this film has reaped some awesome performances from its cast, notably Matt Dillon playing a been-to-long-in-the-force type cop and the desperate and fearful housewife trapped in her own life Sandra Bullock.
Crash tackles the always tricky and always heatedly debated subject of racism in society. The film has been set in LA, most probably as LA is a city with a massively ethnically-diverse population and a huge divide between the classes. However this film could have been set in nearly any big city in the western world. The world is now so globalise, there is very few places left where you will not meet/pass in the street/know/ignore a person from a different ethnic background to yourself.
The film shows racism and ignorance in an un-apologetic and realistic context. Other films have (often successfully) tackled racism and the causes of, but none I have seen have shown it in such an obvious and everyday context. The characters in this film for the most part are not bad people, nor uneducated, nor malicious. However they do commit acts of racism and ignorance, small and large, based on the stereotypes and presumptions they have in their mind from personal experience or from the media. The film then goes on to show how even the smallest slip of the tongue, a lazy comment here or there can go on to have drastic impacts.
The film never becomes preachy at any time nor does it try to impose any views on the audience. It shows in a matter of fact way, exactly the sort of things that happen everyday and exactly the sort of things we hear and sometimes say or think about people, just because of the preconception we have due to their apparent race.
I work in a job where I come into contact with literally hundreds of foreign people, people of a different racial background to myself and people of many diverse cultures every single day. I wish I could show this film to all of my colleagues as the amount of pre-judgement I hear muttered or even see practised while working with these people is scary. This film would show certain colleagues of mine that what they think is a harmless remark, or even think that a view they hold is valid because they think they know something about a particular race of people, is the worst kind of judgement that they can ever make.
Go watch this film right now.