Crash? How about Trainwreck?

Rating: 5/10 (12 May 2005)

Perhaps the most striking and jarring stereotype revealed by this film is the filmmaker's own apparent belief that the American public is completely incapable of understanding subtlety. This is not so much a movie as a sledgehammer assault to the head. I was not offended as a white person, or as a woman, or as a resident of Los Angeles, but as an intelligent person capable of comprehending undertone, facial expression, and unforced dialogue.
While Haggis makes the astute observation that our quotidian lives are charged with many levels of racial prejudice and misunderstanding, the words coming from these characters' mouths are as misplaced as the movies that attempt to have modern characters speaking in iambic pentameter. Who are the characters in Crash? Certainly not any of the Angelenos I know. No one spends their entire day pontificating about race, even if the subject is always there, bubbling just under the surface. No one uses these characters' vocabulary, nobody is so one- dimensional. Is it too much to ask that Hollywood create a movie that deals with race without making race itself the only character with any sort of definition and development? Why are we hit over the head with the concept of race but leave the theater wondering who the hell those poor souls were, and on which vacuous studio lot, in whose overly eager brain, we can find them?