Haggis re-defines and expands on the meaning of heavy-handed

Rating: 3/10 (25 November 2008)

This didn't look all that good to me when it came out; looked like a just-as-obvious only more-black updating of Lawrence Kasdan's "Grand Canyon" and that seemed unlikely to be something that would win me over. Shocked when it won Best Picture; also shocked that one of my favorite critics loved it, and even more shocked now that I've actually seen it. I knew I was going to be in trouble pretty quickly, the glossy, burnished artificial lighting and restless camera just didn't seem to belong to the rather intimate story Haggis was trying to tell.
Ah, but what's that? Intimate? LA is the world, Haggis wants us to believe, and the world is racist, hateful and violent. All of it. Without exception. This is what was so noxious about the film to me -- every single character is a collection of hatred, fear, suspicion and suspended violence; and every character (of course) has a moment of redemption, and obvious and simplistic choice of whether to do "evil" or "good." The cardboard, one-dimensional treatment of the "people" here is made even worse by the extraordinary and ridiculous set of coincidences that bring them all together, completely Dickensian in scope but completely underserved and unbelievable, because these are not people but types and cut-outs. Asking me to accept all of this in a two-hour film that never fleshes anyone out beyond skin tone and class, and asking me to accept that this is the world we live in....too much, Mr. Haggis. If I believed that "Crash" was the world, I'd have killed myself long ago. It's hard to remember a more cynical film with a worse view of humanity, which wouldn't alone make the film worthless -- it's the simpleminded, heavy-handed psychology behind it all that does that. And I saw that as someone who considers himself pretty cynical, and pretty negative in his prognosis for humanity. This is unquestionably the worst Best Picture winner I've seen, and one of the worst films of the 2000s so far. I liked a couple of the actors (Terrence Howard especially) and I have to say I was kept interested -- if only to predict nearly every scene and then to choke up laughing when I was right.
It's a sad, sad commentary on Hollywood that this film and "Driving Miss Daisy" are the two most visible, award-winning dramas about race in the past couple of decades, and that two of our most gifted directors (Charles Burnett and Spike Lee), who both happen to be black and have never won Oscars, still have to struggle to get financing on anything that's not white-oriented enough.