Some heart but little humanity

Rating: 3/10 (7 March 2006)

Though unworthy as a Best Picture Oscar winner by most people's standards, Paul Haggis' Crash does have some heart. But it also lacks credibility as a drama about race, is contrived to the point of trivialising the very issues it appears to want to illuminate and drowns in the bathetic nature of Haggis' script, whose weaknesses as a writer were obviously reigned in by FX Toole's source material for last year's Million Dollar Baby, a film that, unlike Crash, had a director, Clint Eastwood, that knew the power of its story was indelibly linked to his ability to control its emotions. In contrast, Crash is an emotional bubble bath.
Still, the cast far exceeds the requirements of Haggis' thumbnail sketch of a script, at least offering dignified performances where no characters actually exist. Don Cheadle, Loretta Devine, Ludicrous (sic throughout, thanks to IMDb's spell checker) Terrence Howard, Ruby Dee, Brendan Fraser and especially the too little seen Jennifer Esposito; even Sandra Bullock does a fine job compressing the whole of Driving Miss Daisy into about two scenes. Thandie Newton should probably never be hired to play a black woman but I'm pretty sure that was the point of her casting; Matt Dillon as a cuddly faced racist cop is a bit of a stretch but is indicative of the kind of fence-straddling Haggis does throughout. Ryan Phillippe impresses as a gay cop.
But ultimately Crash is too manipulative for any viewer to take seriously. Haggis' dichotomy of human nature is far too simplistic to mark him out as much of an observer much less a sage on issues of multiculturalism. A primary set piece where Haggis sacrifices what little credibility he has for creating a modestly produced, small scale drama about race, is far too contrived and manipulative to engage the viewer furtherat that point, in a scene involving a little girl and some blank ammunition, Haggis reveals precisely his superficial interest in these issues; he merely wants to entertain. Later when he uses a truckload of illegal immigrants as a prop to illuminate yet more triteness about Ludicrous' character, it is precisely thatcompletely ludicrous. That Haggis presents the entirety of human trafficking in a two-minute nutshell is really a shameless, pass the barf bag moment. Crash isn't a film for people with real concerns. That Oprah Winfrey herself compares her experience of not being let in to a Paris branch of Hermes after hours without an appointment to being a "Crash" moment completely encapsulates the insincerity and superficiality of this film.
Oscar ignored Do The Right Thing in 1990 and 16 years later they're still not ready for it. That they honoured Robert Altman, whose esteemed and far superior 1993 film Short Cuts is an obvious reference point for the highly derivative, red-headed foster child that is Haggis' Crash, is just one of many ironies that abound in The Academy. Voting Crash for Best Picture would indicate that the majority of academy members have never even seen an Altman film at all. The excellent Hustle & Flow is a far more honest and realistic look at race and culture; despite the presence of two of its stars in Crash (Howard and Ludicrous), you don't see anything approaching the vibrancy or audacity of Three 6 Mafia in Haggis' anodyne Crash.
That said, I think I preferred it when the Australians made it and called it Lantana or, even more so, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. Some may wish to check out Lawrence Kasdan's version called Grand Canyon or even the great Michael Haneke's version, the excellent Code Unknown. Even Cronenberg's Crash would be better than Haggis'; though it may lack a heart at least it has some humanity.