Superficial

Rating: 6/10 (19 March 2006)

Crash is in essence a glossed up remake of Grand Canyon. The premise is the same: a racially diverse group of people in Los Angeles who live separate lives are thrown together by coincidence. But for these coincidences, their lives would never intersect. Every interaction in Crash is racial in a way that hits the audience over the head with the movie's theme. Racism in Crash is a matter of not being treated with sensitivity. People are meant to endure the "tryanny" of being insulted. The people in Crash, like Grand Canyon, live lives of unremitting grimness that seems gratuitous. The movie suggests that if only people would be more racially sensitive, life would not be so grim. The oppression of having to actual endure racial insensitivity is unintentionally juxtaposed with lives that don't seem that bad. I definitely got the impression that the film writer (who can stand in for most of the Hollywood establishment) projects his own personal racial isolation on the world at large. This accounts for the film's superficial take on the subject. People who actually interact with people from other racial and socio-economic backgrounds know that life is not so gratuitously race-obsessed. The Magnolia-like editing of the film means that the characterizations in the film are not nuanced. We see only a sliver of their lives. The one exception is Dillon's character, but none of the other actors did anything remarkable. The film does have some decent plot twists. The film is well done, but is style over substance. A decent film, but not an Oscar-worthy one.