Road to Irrelevance

Rating: 1/10 (28 April 2006)

Crash is the word of order that robbed the Oscar home. The devotion of Ryan (Matt Dillon) for his dad crashes with the will of the assistance programs that ignores the welfare of an aged man to inject dollars in quotas that only mask the exclusion of blacks. The always passive attitude of the Latin maid that works for lady Jean (Sandra Bullock) crashes into her solitude. As much as the incapacity of Cameron (Terrance Howard) to say "Sorry, Chris. I love you!" to his wife crashes into her lack for an arm that holds and protects her. And so it goes...
The collisions of life, where surprise and routine look each other eye-to-eye, resume itself, in the interpretation of Paul Haggis, about the daily of Shwarzenagger's California, in a structure at the shape of a mosaic. An arithmetical arrangement of losses and damages is the balance of the formal experience of the director. A negative balance. Racism doesn't lose in "Crash". It triumphs. And that is not mere plea of realistic filming.
The mosaic technique was popularized by Robert Altmen (Short Cuts, 1993) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, 1999). In this register, each character is a wire, entangled to each other. But the coldness of Haggis turns them into a numerical equation. In his algebra, blacks, jews, arabs and latins are divisible by the same denominator: intolerance. The white that hates the black, the black that hates the hispanic, that hates the arab, that hates the white, that as everyone else, hates everyone. But there is a variable, an unknown delta, that blocks the director of getting to the value of "x".
Ryan, at the terrific performance by Dillon, is the only character in scene that is more then just forced by the director through the clichés of cheap sociology. Paul Thomas Anderson, also cruel to his characters, didn't dissimulate anything, he attacked the characters openly, not pretending to "understand their motives". The racist Ryan that beats on "niggers" and abuses a "bitchy" has a reason to beat who has too much melanin in the skin: Haggis makes a mistake right there, he justifies the hate of the cop at the incongruence of the politically correct. A narrative trap to guide the character to a determined course that will justify his actions later on. A full plate for the fascists.
Since he doesn't go deeper on the other character in their urban tragedy, Haggis incurs into artificialism. He knows that in the land of the Governator inclusion and equality screams in agony, scream the same "I'll be back" consecrated by Shwarzie's characters. But does nothing for the pray of justice to echo through Hollywood.
Why the hack would this guy sell his film about racism by opening with such a smarty dialogue of two black youths in which one of them complains of being identified as a thug because of his color and, at the end of the scene, pulls out a gun and steals a car? As you can see, anyway you slice it, it's clear that a vote for Crash was a vote for simple-minded self-satisfaction, social relevance for dummies. To throw weight behind Brokeback, a film that genuinely challenges deep-set notions of sexuality, masculinity and love within American mythes, proved a bridge too far. The Academy would like to have us believe it has its thumb on the pulse of America, even as their choices reveal a shallow self-regard that borders on the masturbatory. The Oscars more than dropped the ball; they placed pleasant fallacy over clear-eyed truth, self-absorption over significance. Good thing Mr. Clooney made his comments early in the evening. By night's end, it became clear what path the Academy has settled on: the road to irrelevance.