An Utter Disappointment

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2006)

Devoid of any subtlety whatsoever, CRASH purports to portray the state of race relations in Los Angeles. Well, if CRASH were indeed accurate with respect to its depiction of race relations in Los Angeles, with which the Academy voters seem to agree, then I sure am glad I live in New York City.
Extremely didactic and bombastic, CRASH has reduced racial politics into diluted, mind numbing stereotypes and extremely broadly written characters that are nothing more than caricatures. CRASH takes the easy way out, does not, and indeed cannot, with its large number of players on its canvas, delve into character complexities or at least try to mimic, if not actually depict, the way real people deal with racism. Among its embarrassment of extremely unrealistic scenes (and the film is replete with them), a rich, well-mannered white woman (of the noblesse oblige variety) hurled insults at a Latino locksmith who is changing the lock of her front door and, within his earshot, accused him of planning to sell the key as soon as he gets the opportunity to do so. What instead would have been realistic was for this character to express her concerns to her white husband a couple of rooms away in their large luxury home with no one else in the room.
Such white woman is somehow redeemable from this faux pas with the Latino locksmith because cheap redemptions abound in this movie: this rich white woman later slips down the stairs and, lo and behold, the only one who tended to her injuries was her Latina maid. And just like that, the rich white woman declared that her Latina maid, whose services were paid for by her and her husband, was her "best friend." Presto! Her earlier treatment of the locksmith is forgiven.
The film also places up front and center a white racist cop who also happens to be his father's caretaker. He treats black people like 3rd class citizens, but Paul Haggis would almost make it seem that this character's racist attitudes were balanced out by his having to care for his father. I would further argue that Haggis posits that racism is excusable when one has other personal concerns in his or her life, and that is simply indefensible. Racism cannot be excused by one's family duties, no matter how overwhelming they may be. And, as with the white woman mentioned above, a cheap redemption also awaits this white racist cop. A black woman he earlier molests in front of her black husband is caught in a car about to explode. And who comes to this woman's rescue, well it's none other than this racist-molesting cop! And at the end of this sequence, we are supposed to feel sympathy for this cop, when arguably it is a combination of his duty as a cop as well as his instinct of self-preservation (after all he was in the car that was about to explode with the black woman he earlier molested) that truly motivated his "heroic" efforts.
Racism is not reducible to mere black and white. Racist cops are nothing novel: just recall the Rodney King case, the Abner Louima scandal and the Amadou Diallo news stories. Racism in the real world, or at least the world that is outside the bubble that is Los Angeles, however, festers beneath the surface, is much more subtle and covert. It's when I used to walk around the malls as a teenager and was constantly followed by the security guards and sales staff asking me if I needed assistance, while white kids roamed about the store free from the prying eyes and intrusive conduct of store management. They are comments passed seemingly innocuously by people who tell me that they could never tell between Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos and other Southeast Asians because they all look the same. It's when people assume that no black person who works as a secretary or receptionist could ever speak non-broken English.
And subtleties like these are what CRASH is glaringly missing. In this day and age, if there is one thing we do with respect to this most sensitive of topics, we DO NOT vocalize our misconceptions/beliefs toward certain races and minorities absent heated confrontations or inebriated/altered states, and, more importantly, shout out these beliefs within the presence or earshot of members of the aforementioned groups.
CRASH would have us believe that everyone walks around so wound up and ready to lash out a racial epithet to anyone and everyone whose skin color and/or cultural background happen to be different from yours: be it your girlfriend, someone you got into a car accident with, your hired help, and policemen in the guise of performing their civic and professional duties. And if Haggis really wanted to portray "duality" in that everyone has good and bad within them, then why did he carve out exceptions for Asians, as exemplified by the film's Asian male character and his wife, who the film deemed as the ONLY irredeemable characters in the its throughline? CRASH has dumbed down racism to the point that if someone tells me they feel like they learned something about themselves from viewing the film, I feel nothing but pity for them because they obviously have not experienced racism and they either live in an extremely homogeneous society or not in the real world at all. There is nothing novel about CRASH, and there are no lessons to be learned from it that are not self-evident when one just steps outside one's home.
CRASH fails in every way possible to show accurately racism and the true evil it is. Racism is complicated and for a project this ambitious, CRASH should not have been rewarded with the Best Picture Oscar especially when it failed in all respects--artistically, technically and otherwise--from achieving its, admittedly, lofty goals.