Life is a healing process

Rating: 9/10 (4 March 2006)

**** I have to get one thing of my chest first, concerning some reviewers here on this movie's web-page: I've read several comments of reviewers who hate this movie that were shockingly insulting. I felt personally offended. They actually have the nerve to explicitly insinuate that everyone who likes this movie is lacking intelligence, shallow or just plain stupid. I saw CRASH together with my brother and we both thought it was nothing short of being excellent. We are actually regarded as being well-educated persons (with a love for cinema in general), so who are you to call us morons? I kindly, yet firmly, ask all of you so-called intellectuals to refrain yourselves from such insulting statements in the future (since you're not likely to come back here and remove or edit your posts). ****
Ensemble-pictures have become a genre of their own and I myself have still to encounter the first bad one in this genre. CRASH can be compared to a lot of movies, but I don't think Iñárritu's 21 GRAMS is one of them (For the record: I think 21 GRAMS is a masterpiece and CRASH is 'just' excellent). I really love it when a movie demands the attention of the viewer. And I'm even more pleased when that attention is rewarded on several occasions. Some events in CRASH are predictable but you can never exactly predict how the events will occur or what the outcome will be. I hate to break the news to all of you who hate this movie, but that's clever scriptwriting. The whole cast gives a more than decent performance, even though not all of them are first-rate talents.
I'm not going to praise this movie by telling you all the things I liked about it, but instead I'm going to explain why I didn't give it 10 out of 10 stars. For example, on at least two occasions I had the feeling that writer/director Paul Haggis underestimates the intelligence of the viewer. After the pay-off of the initial set-ups, Haggis often shows us totally redundant shots of things we already know (the address on the dashboard, the blanks in the red box). The viewer is perfectly capable of figuring that out by himself. Also, I did find the whole racism-theme too dominant throughout the movie. Simply every character has issues with it to that point it almost becomes annoying. This movie is about so many other things too, so Haggis could have easily put more emphasis on those other subjects. On a final note, I sometimes felt the musical score was a bit inappropriate.
In the end those are just minor problems. CRASH simply is an excellent movie and one that deserves to be seen. I must add, however, even if the characters all felt 100% realistic, the actual events portrayed in CRASH don't always reflect real life (in my opinion). But then again it is still a movie. If you liked Altman's SHORT CUTS and Anderson's MAGNOLIA, then CRASH might be right up your alley. And if you liked them all, then please take the effort to watch Tom Barman's ANYWAY THE WIND BLOWS, one of the finest movies to come out of Belgium for a long time. One more thing about CRASH: It does contain at least one basic truth about life: You Live, You Learn, You Change.