Crash almost tricks us into thinking it's a great film

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2005)

Crash Reviewed by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com Rating: 3 out of 4 It may sound silly, but Crash almost tricks us into thinking it's a great film. For me, it was good, but certainly not great. You see, it's an ensemble film that has a few great stories out of its many. Like a symphony that has a great violin line, but a mediocre cello. It wows us with one of its elements to cover up the others. And although the others aren't exactly bad, they just aren't up to par with the film's best.
Sporting one of the most impressive casts this year, Crash tells nearly a dozen stories that explore the racial aspect of American society post-9/11. Encompassing all races and the stereotypes that follow them, Crash delves into the reasons racial crimes occur. It doesn't criminalize the acts, but gives them humanity, showing us why they occur and not simply condemning the people who commit them. Problem is, Crash sometimes turns into the film I just described above: an educational film fit for a high school Health class. For many of Crash's stories, Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby) fails to bring the characters past the racial crimes they're story into more of a lesson than an actual story. But for the two or three plot lines that do achieve this, the result is nothing short of an emotional powerhouse.
Part of this problem can be attributed to the film's short running length. With the reel running under two hours, it's simply impossible to flesh out so many characters. One of my favorite ensemble films, Magnolia, was three hours long. But despite the long running length, I felt like I had read deep into each character and could weave each one into the story as a whole. Crash isn't quite long enough to do that. It allows for the development of some characters, but leaves many out to dry with their overly didactic stories. The characters become defined by their acts, not the other way around.
That's not to say Crash is a poor film however. Which is why I say it almost tricks its audience into thinking it's a great film. Except for the script design, every other element of the film is of near-perfect quality. The acting in particular is a high point. I don't have to sing praise for the veterans like Thandie Newton, Brendan Fraser, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, etc because you can already expect their performances to be as good as the script will allow them. The most surprising role, however, came from Chris "Ludicrous" Bridges, the mind behind some of the worst music on the radio today. Ironically, Bridges' (I'm NOT calling him Ludicrous) character is a rightist African American car jacker. He constantly pontificates the flaws of white America and its prolonged discrimination against the black man. In one of the better scenes of the movie (out of pure irony alone) Bridges states his distaste for rap music, commenting on how it's diverged from the roots it began with and deteriorated into material that further incriminates his race. Does this sort of music ring a bell with Ludicrous? I think so.
Crash is the sort of film that becomes a masterpiece because of its ability to stay in our memory. History's shown us that if a film's quotable then it has a longer shelf life. But beyond quotability, can the film really hold itself up? In Crash's respect, it can. We may sometimes wonder if we're being lectured on racism by Hollywood, but then we're pulled deeper into one of the two or three stories that truly takes hold of us. And for those two or three stories, Crash is entirely worth it.
-Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com