Much Ado About Nothing

Rating: 5/10 (9 May 2005)

Much ado about nothing... This is all that's running through my head as I am walking out of the screening of Paul Haggis' directorial debut, Crash. As I am watching this movie, it suddenly occurred to me -- I have seen it before. I saw it when I saw Magnolia, and Traffic, and Grand Canyon, etc. I suddenly realized that formulaic, cookie-cutter plot lines and freeze-dried characters weren't the exclusive domain of the buddy action picture or Adam Sandler movie. It seems that the lack of creativity and voice can, and is, being applied to the message genre as well. In this case the message is racism, but it doesn't matter because the sermon is the same.
The thing is, all of the actors in the ensemble do an amazing job, and each takes these very substantial meaty roles and chews them up. But in the end, there is nothing new to say. Each character has good and bad in them. Each one is racist and each one isn't. They, like we, are colored in shades of gray.
But deep inside the film, there is a better movie trying to get out. There are moments of true questions of abuse of authority that I would have loved to have seen more about. There are moments of tremendous tenderness on every level between a father and son, a wife and husband, between friends, between lovers... There are moments where I wanted to know more about how these very real, well-developed characters got to where they are and how they are managing when they find themselves exposed and vulnerable. These moments -- these relationships may or may not have anything to do with racism, but it has everything to do with being human. These are the moments that I got caught up in and these are the moments that were given no more than a peek of life before the movie moved onto some other contrived opportunity to once again demonstrate a scene of racism.
In the end, the characters of Crash, like society, are filled with shades of gray. Crash seems to have a lot of volume, but not really a lot to say.