what a depressing vision

Rating: 3/10 (18 August 2005)

Crash is an uncomfortable film to sit through because the characters either speak, represent, or point out ugly things. Everybody is sad and grievance is connected to racial prejudice, insensitivity or self-centered ignorance, and the film is completely and utterly in your face about those elements that it soon becomes clear that this may be a reflection of mass psychology rather than reality. Ultimately, the film argues, everybody is a victim, and everybody is an aggressor, and that this is arrangement--though the social disconnect that comes with it is horribly depressing--is for the most part inevitable. In the closing shots of the film, as another Crash occurs, the tone is humorous. "It's the sense of touch--we miss it so much that we Crash to each other just to feel something" says Don Cheadle's detective. But by the end, formal miscalculation and a fair amount of cheese sort of taint any sense of touch the film may have temporarily accorded us.
For by refusing to deal with any of its threads at length and allowing us to merely glimpse the problem, "Crash" becomes merely a crash course in racial dynamics as Haggis sees it.. Everybody has a problem and the question of race is almost always on their mind. As the film opens, two women who get into a little car accident, one Hispanic and the other Asian, hurl racial insults at each other as soon as they step out of the car. This is Spike Lee anger but without the insight into progress. When Monte in The 25th Hour condemned and cursed out his fellow new yorkers in harsh racial terms there was the reminder that he was one of them and had the right to speak of them this way, but the characters in Crash declare their racist remarks in that embarrassing, in your face manner that modern social etiquette declares to be evil. Even full bloodied racists don't speak that way, and the truth is that people are more connected than Crash would have you believe, and when I say connected I don't mean in the 'crisscrossing paths' theme the film ineffectually tries to pull off. I mean it in the sense that people in the real world--of different races--get along or hide their hatreds better than Haggis would have you believe. There's a young Hispanic man in the film who functions solely to act as the victim of Prejudice--from a white woman and an Iranian man. Forget that the woman in question--given her high class pretensions--wouldn't speak that away about a minority in the presence of other people or that the Iranian's anger and racism are inexplicable and contrived. Instead, what you notice is that every moment the Hispanic dude is on the screen the film becomes a pure exercise in cheese and sermonizing.
Tough and uncomfortable questions are posed but, in trying to capture them from every perspective, the film undoes them. It is short but feels stuffed. Just as we're getting the hang of one character we're cut to another to the effect that all we get is an impression of the these people but never full understanding. It's these impressions Haggis is concerned with, the one note characters and the sudden transformations. The film's best and most powerful storyline (which could have served as the basis for a better film)--that involving the sexually molesting/racist cop and the two affluent black couple--is ruined by the clichéd Connected Fate Amongst Strangers theme Haggis insists on. The film has been compared to Magnolia because of this aspect, but whatever its shortcomings, Magnolia was gloriously and awesomely musical and operatic in its flow. Crash in comparison feels clunky. Rarely did I develop any strong attachment to one plot thread or rarely did I long to return to another because there's no respectable sense of flow and rhythm to the scenes. In retrospect more scenes between Matt Dillon'monster cop and Ryan Phillippe's hero would've been nice--in retrospect a closer examination of the racial politics black cops play would've been welcome, or perhaps a look into how the media prefers to portray blacks--but all these elements are raised but grace by, never touching us, and ultimately all Haggis offers is ham-fisted irony. Suddenly the monster cop becomes a hero through a courageous act halfway through the film and the cop we thought a hero becomes a monster through a terrible act. A better one: Ludicrous saving Thai slaves while affectionately referring to them as "chinamen." I walked out thinking the title was too apt