Is the Academy kidding with this?

Rating: 3/10 (25 April 2006)

Like a bad student film with big-name stars in its cast, Paul Haggis' puerile and self-important "Crash" is a masterpiece for the easily impressed. Filled with bathos and bombast, and more implausible coincidences than an 800-page novel by Charles Dickens (and no offense meant to Mr. Dickens), "Crash" plays less like a movie and more like some underachiever's dissertation for a Sociology course entitled Racism 101. (Racist white cop fondles black woman in front of her husband at routine traffic stoppause projectordiscuss what this scene shows about racism in our societyresume filmsame racist white cop pulls same black woman to safety from burning wreckagepause projectordiscuss what this scene says about the possibility of redemption for every individualetc.). Astonishingly, this piece of mealy mouthed claptrap won the Academy Award for the Best Picture of 2005.
Cribbing its interlocking, multi-character format from "Short Cuts," "Grand Canyon," "Magnolia," "13 Conversations About One Thing" and a whole host of other similar but far superior films, Haggis' work purports to tell us that everyone - and I mean EVERYONE - living in Los Angeles is a thoroughgoing racist and bigot and, even more amazingly, spends twenty-four hours a day giving voice to their prejudice. Forget about political correctness; these people talk about race, race and nothing but race for nigh unto two hours in ways that show that Haggis is completely tone deaf when it comes to how people in the real world actually speak. This is a movie devoid of a single plausible moment (you know that verisimilitude is not high on this film's agenda when it starts snowing in Los Angeles!); it's a movie in which characters act completely without reason or motivation and in which every event that happens, no matter how idiotic or ridiculous, does so in the service of the message. On the level of dramaturgy alone, "Crash" is an unmitigated disaster and a blueprint for how not to make a movie.
Unfortunately, as "Crash" itself begins to crash and burn, an awful lot of fine people wind up getting trapped inside the wreckage. A largely talented cast is wasted on an assortment of poorly written, shallow characters, and Haggis has no idea of how to create either drama or tension in any of the scenes he shows us. The moody score by Mark Isham does its best to make it all seem powerful and important, but the sheer incompetence of the writing and directing rob the film of both those qualities. Indeed, rarely has a movie been as full of itself as "Crash" is, and rarely has a movie explored such a serious and important subject in as pretentious and superficial a manner. Perhaps the most insulting aspect of the film is how easily it bestows redemption on even its most wretched characters, as if all of life's problems could be so easily wrapped up in time for the closing credits. As others before me have pointed out, this is indeed a "feel good" movie about racism, the very last thing a movie about racism should ever be.
If you can buy a film in which an assortment of whiney, unappealing characters hurl racial invectives at one another for an hour and a half, then turn around and throw themselves into each others' arms in time for the tear-stained finale, then "Crash" may be the movie for you. But if you find yourself laughing rather than weeping through the course of the story, don't say you hadn't been warned beforehand.
What could all the fine folk in the Motion Picture Academy have been thinking?