A controversial Best Picture win but a deserved one nonetheless.

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2019)

"Munich", "Capote", "Good Night and Good Luck" and the favorite "Brokeback Mountain" were all great and daring movies but they never challenged cinematic conventions the way Paul Haggis' passion-project did. His "Crash" defies tropes and genres not in a politically but also socially incorrect way, through interlocking stories all set in the canvas of a post-September 11 Los Angeles. I had said about Cassavetes' "Faces" that it felt like a slap in our faces, "Crash" doesn't just slap, it literally crashes reality into our faces.
The title gives you the right idea by using the metaphor of the car, it is introduced by Don Cheadle's monologue about people needing a crash sometimes to get a sense of touch, to forget how remote they are one to another. This is the same L.A. Tom Cruise had just panned the same year in "Collateral", a town of cold selfishness where cars eventually play a pivotal role in the way they make various intrusion possible, not all of them are providential of course. Indeed, either for a carjacking, a ride, a police control or a rescue, every action has its consequences, some tragic, some inspiring, some driven by the best intentions yet causing unfortunate collateral damages, and vice versa.
Collateral, that word again. Not every intrusion has a cause or serve a point, most of them are accidental yet they have an effect, and the way each effect seems to make some statement about our humanity is a credit to the triumphant intelligence of Haggis' script. And since I don't want to spoil the film, I will only focus on one character, Matt Dillon as a LAPD officer. This is a man whose establishing moment consists on humiliating a black couple (Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton) during a control. In any lesser movie, such a despicable character would get a Karmic revenge. "Crash" ironically makes him the most human. It all works by contrast, most characters dodge prejudices or racism while having them printed in their subconscious, Dillon's character doesn't cheat with his views.
And that's "Crash" power, it dares to challenge our perceptions of the ugliest symptoms of prejudice by showing us how deeply rooted they are in reality and experience, it's not beautiful but at least it's real. A rich white woman (Sandra Bullock) acts scared when crossing the path of two black kids on the pavement, what happens next actually proves her right and she even uses it as an "I told you" argument to her husband (Brendan Fraser). Yet one of the carjackers is clearly not as ethically challenged as his partner and in the end, he's hitchhiked by Dillon's rookie police partner (Ryan Philippe) who was shocked by his colleagues' behavior and asked for a new assignment. What emerges from that encounter serves a painful but valuable lesson to anyone who believes his conscience is cleaner than everyone else's.
Indeed, "Crash" isn't about feelings, intentions or motives but plain actions, and reactions that translate themselves into action, and car crashes are the right metaphors for these revealing moments in our lives when we stop being trapped by our inhibitions. Consequently, so many brutal things happen that we might miss the little touches. Take the locksmith (Michael Pena), he's mistaken for a thug by both the rich white woman and the Iranian man who was insulted by a gun store owner who must have taken for an Arab. Yet Pena plays the least troublemaking character in the film, but even he isn't immune to danger or violent misunderstanding.
The film isn't all dark and gritty and there a a few guardian angels here and there, which is appropriate in Los Angeles, but so many devilish vibes poison relationships between people who have so much in common. The Persian man is obviously worn-down by all the prejudice he might have suffered from and the irony is that it made him more unstable and threatening. Another irony is that some black characters use racism as an excuse to act no better than the oppressors they accuse. The film is full of ironies where people become attackers in the name of victimhood. And that did remind me of another urban drama classic.
In a way, "Crash" plays out like a "Do The Right Thing" for the 2000s, with people doing the thing they think is right, allowing tragedy to burst out the most random and anticlimactic moments. In fact, it's not about doing the right or the bad thing, but the fact that some people we know to be good can commit reprehensible acts, and then you have Dillon's character first depicted as a hateful cop first but then a caring son to his ill father and a hero, this speaks a thousand words, and dig a thousand truths, many of them quite inconvenient for our mentalities.
Yes, today, we live in a world or a culture of plain victimization, it's all about white vs. minorities, women vs. men etc. and the problem with "Crash" is that it was set at a time where there was no smart phone, where most of these things wouldn't happen without someone immediately denouncing it, which is good in theory but who knows how disastrous the consequences can be when everything is shown in a binary black-or-white way. No need to get further; if there ever is one thing "Crash" shows is that the accused ones can be victims and victims aren't always innocent.
We all have public faces and backgrounds, some aspects of us are known, others are not, but we also don't know the real content of our characters until we're confronted to the most extreme situations like crashes or similar car encounters. "Crash" is mostly about people learning about themselves, to be better. Today's world is too binary and obtuse, even accusing "Crash" of being manipulative, and while I'm wondering how we could take so many step back, I'll always consider the film a humanistic masterpiece