Some excellent scenes and performances, but ultimately flawed

Rating: 7/10 (31 August 2005)

I expected to enjoy Crash very much, as it had a terrific cast and is a film built around a group of interconnected characters and stories, which draws its strength from characters and feelings instead of being a lazy, shallow blockbuster. I did enjoy it, but I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't as good as it could have been, and didn't completely hang together as a film.
There are a lot of fascinating characters and situations here. A couple of cops, one male one female, who have a tense relationship, struggle with themselves and each other as they try and unravel a complicated and political case. A pair of seemingly articulate and reasonable, albeit contrary and frustrated, young black men turn out to be professional car-jackers. They rob a high-profile white couple and we see the impact on their lives, and on the black professional couple who are stopped by the police thinking the similar car they are driving is the stolen one. We also see a hard-working Latino family man and a hard-pressed Iranian working family who are the victims in various ways of prejudice and bad luck. These stories and more are wound together in a series of memorable scenes that pack a lot of emotional punch. There is a strong element of racial tension in the air, and the atmosphere is really well-captured by writer-director Paul Haggis.
The problem is that having set up this fascinating collection of characters and stories, the makers unfortunately make some pretty wrong moves in deciding where to take them. A lot of really ridiculous coincidences are required to resolve a lot of the stories which are simply not believable, and some are quite badly conceived. It becomes melodramatic, which really jars with the very real and strong stories and people they began with and made the viewer care about. At least the characters are true to themselves in the way they act throughout, but a lot of the emotional impact is lost, and that compares badly to the strength of feeling Paul Haggis captured with his previous script, Clint's Million Dollar Baby.
The film reminded me - and suffered in comparison to - two films I really loved, Magnolia and Short Cuts. And those films show where Crash went wrong. To make this kind of film work you either need to build up believable characters and situations so carefully that the viewer is totally on board and believes everything from there on in, like Altman the master did with Short Cuts. The other way is like PT Anderson's Magnolia, reminiscent of South American magical realism, to set up characters that you really care about and want to follow on their journeys, then say to the audience, "OK, what happens next is kind of unreal, but let's pretend that there is something strange in the air tonight that makes this happen, and we'll see what it does with our characters." The audience doesn't really believe it but cares enough to go with the film and believe in the emotional truth of the stories even if they are unrealistic. Crash falls between these two choices by creating enough reality to make us believe it, but not building up that magical atmosphere that would make us go with it. Also both Short Cuts and Magnolia were nearer three hours while this is just less than two, and perhaps that rush led the filmmakers stumbling down the path of melodrama to resolve these interwoven stories in record time.
That said, there is a lot to enjoy and admire here, some terrific film-making and excellent performances throughout, especially Don Cheadle as a repressed cop, Sandra Bullock's best performance yet as a snippy, frustrated woman who hates the person she is becoming, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges as one of the car-jackers and (the pick of the bunch) Michael Pena, who is simply superb as the Latino family man who finds himself caught up in a lot of other people's problems while doing his best to deal with his own. I'm glad I went to see it, and it's better than most things that have been released this year, and anyone who likes this kind of movie will enjoy it. But it could have been much better - on the plus side, it's made me realize I should go and buy Short Cuts and Magnolia on DVD!