Way to taint a good Cronenberg title

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2005)

This is not a particularly subtle movie. And I'm not such a particularly big fan of subtlety either. Of course, when the lack of subtlety is not a choice but feels more like lack of confidence, lack of experience in envisioning a movie or even plain lack of smarts, it begins to annoy me. When Crash started, I was fairly interested on it. About 20 minutes in, Paul Haggis had killed any sort of appeal his so-called characters and so-called film-making resources could've had, and I was bored. An hour later, it had become unintentional comedy. Fortunately, I was with a friend, so we got a chance to have some whispered laughs.
Haggis is telling a choral story driving about twenty so-called characters through the streets of L.A. While I frankly don't know much about the movies of people like Altman and P.T. Anderson (I've only seen M.A.S.H., Gosford Park and Punch-drunk love), I can see why people bring up their names while talking about Crash. In particular, there's a way of using music tracks and editing to connect different characters, dramatic situations and ways of living that's a desperate effort to resemble those more talented directors.
The movie shoves these characters around, telling us snippets of their lives, which are 24/7 dedicated to discriminating people from other races or discussing their views on race. There's a black cop played by Don Cheadle, a white politician played by Brendan Fraser with a white and very very racist wife played by Sandra Bullock, a proud-to-be-black black sitcom actress played by Thandie Newton and some other people. All in all, as I said, they're about twenty, I think, and they keep bumping into each other so often that I think none else lives on L.A. apart from them. And they all really really hate each other.
What does it all amount to? Well, at the beginning of the movie, Don Cheadle (who does the best acting in the movie and has the only remotely interesting role, everything has to be said) says "In LA, nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something". I think that pretty much summarizes everything. Well, that, and the comfortable and supposedly meaningful dogma that everyone has a good and a bad side. So, every character in the movie will do one very very nasty thing and one very very good thing. A cop who's offended by the racism of his partner will shoot a black dude because he assumes he's about to pull a gun. The racist cop that's not above pulling a wealthy black/black couple, probably thinking it's a black/white one (Thandie Newton has kinda light skin) will be a good boy to his father who can't pee and save the same woman's life later. It's all really really contrived, really really reiterative and really really lame. On the positive side, Crash is shorter than you probably expect it to be. If you'd like to see a social drama done wrong, just for the fun of it, it almost works as a textbook example and you don't waste much time.
Let me get this straight, before I get accused of something myself  I get what Crash is trying to say, that racism on all of its forms still survives in modern society, concealed as it might be, and that everyone, even not all that bad people, might be guilty of it at any given time. I even agree with it. I just think Haggis did such a poor job of conveying his message that it might even be interpreted wrong. Some of the more supposedly affecting or tough scenes in the movie are so clumsily made and lack so many different kinds of build-up and motivation that you'll pretty likely laugh your ass off at them. Osama guy shooting the little girl with fake bullets and the staring at the gun for a really really long time? Sandra Bullock falling through the stairs? THAI SLAVES COMING OUT OF A TRUCK? Come on, man. It's funnier than every chapter in the last 5 Simpsons seasons.