Multi-pronged story with a bit of gusto but little achievement

Rating: 5/10 (12 January 2009)

Mixing several story lines has become a fixture for independent film-making after Pulp Fiction made it cool. Then independent came to mean nothing more than a genre more prone to grab Oscar noms than the immediate buck at the Box-office.
Most of the time these movies have one very good story and the rest is a bit weak. Soderbergh's Traffic perfectly exemplified this in 2000, and now Crash has come to grab the supreme Academy Award with very little originality and substance indeed. It's not a bad movie but it lacks the feel of a movie that gets into you, only pulling the easy strings, pinching the usual emotional wire in a very professional way. So where is there emotion in Crash? It is hidden here and there with the fine actors yet on the whole it's too scarce to give you the impression it's great. It's nicely put together but it never takes you away.
One scene speaks millions: the one with the little girl running to her father outside the house with the Persian shop owner nearby. Well done. It does work, but inside the whole movie it eventually proves to be only a nicely polished piece with little relevance.
Compare this to Amores Perros. The middle story is weaker but everything is more consistent, everything flows from the camera, it's not only about taking us for an emotional trip around LA, it's truly about characters getting us into a story, their story. Hence the emotion.