A Noble Effort

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2005)

The best thing about Crash is that it gets people talking about racism and bigotry after the movie is over. The subject matter itself would do that, but I think that Haggis does two things to ensure that people talk about bigotry afterwords.
First, Haggis creates characters that are stereotypes, in the worst sense of the word. They are meant to infuriate the audience. Most of the people in this movie have very little nuance or subtlety to their character. This is deliberate, on the director's part.
Second, the first hour of this movie is relentless in its depiction of bigotry. With each new scene, the audience braces itself for another round of racist caricature and vile epithets being spewed by the characters.
My problems with the movie are two.
First, I think that Haggis has too many story lines going, he needed to lop off about two of them--in order to explore the other stories in more depth, and to resolve the remaining story lines more satisfactorily.
My own feeling is that the story line specifically revolving around the white district attorney, played by Brendan Fraser, could have been eliminated (although I do think that, at least the early part of the story of Sandra Bullock, Brendan's wife, was important to keep in the film). I also think that the story line revolving around the Chinese businessman and the slave trade should have been removed.
There are simply too many holes and questions left unanswered by the end of the movie, for it to be considered an excellent movie, in my opinion.
Second, while I understand what I think that Haggis was trying to do with the first hour of non-stop bigotry, I don't think it ultimately works. Haggis needed to rework the structure, so that the viewer got some relief and resolution early in the film to some of the film situations--and so that other problem situations could be introduced later in the movie.
The way the film was structured, the audience becomes somewhat numb by the end of the first hour--from all the tension created by the racist hate being thrown at the viewer. The audience then gets the sense that it can relax a bit, in last hour, as it is mainly a resolution to the conflicts from the first hour--this makes the audience somewhat lazy, I think.
Haggis would have made a better film if he had mixed things up a bit more structurally, so that the audience was constantly on its toes, not knowing whether to expect tension or relief.
My favorite story lines, were the ones revolving around Matt Dillon and Thandie Newton (and her husband, whose face is new to me--so I don't know his name, but he was very good in his role). And the plot revolving around the Hispanic locksmith, his daughter, and the Iranian shopkeeper was also a favorite story line of mine--although I have to admit that some of that story didn't make much sense. It wasn't the daughter's magic cloak that was non-logical, that was perfectly fine. It was the Iranian's attitude toward the Hispanic that didn't make any sense to me, and rang false. But I still found the story line compelling and emotional.