Crash (Warning: Major Spoilers)


The world seem to love it or hate it. I find understand both reactions after seeing the movie.

Most people have pretty strong reactions to this year's Oscar contender, Crash. I can easily understand why. Its goals are obviously to talk about difficult subjects and stir up difficult emotions. I found that I strongly admired the filmmaking, strongly reacted to some of the scenes, and strongly scoffed at some of the movie's basic premises.

First: what's to love.

First and foremost this is an actor's movie. The ensemble is huge and talented. Some stellar folks are in roles way too small...in fact you only get a taste of just about every character. All the stand-outs that others have mentioned are, indeed, standouts...Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton, Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Michael Pena, Ludacris, Larenz tate etc. etc. etc.

Second, and most compelling: there are at least two scenes in this movie that will absolutely suck the breath out of you and leave you shattered. I don't know what it would have been like to see it in a theatre, but sitting on my living room couch I was quite literally bowled over. The first is one of the "crash" scenes in the movie, the other involves a gun and a little girl. Both are almost unbearably painful to watch. The director, Paul Haggis, knows how to use slow motion and lack of sound as well as sound very effectively. There are few movie scenes out there that hit you so hard and so quickly. For some people that's not a big plus...I mean if movies are entertaining what's so great about watching painful scenes? I, on the other hand, appreciate any art form that makes me feel something viscerally. Just amazing filmmaking.

To tell you what's not to love about this movie, I have to tell you first about living in NYC in the late 80s.

I moved to New York in 1986. Yes, it was the fall that the Mets won the Series. But it was also the time when NYC seemed to be on a downhill slide, and at least to people outside the city, it seemed to be a racial powder keg.

Let me list some of the events that happened in the 4 years I lived there:
The Bernard Goetz trial
Howard Beach
Bensonhurst
The Central Park jogger
Tawana Brawley

I'm probably missing some. Sure, there were big stories that weren't racially-oriented...The Preppy Murder in Central Park and the death of poor little Lisa Steinberg being the two that pop into my mind. But mostly we were bombarded with people injured or dying, allegedly at the hands of another race.

Everyone I talked to outside of NY imagined that my days were filled with racial tension, but the truth was very different. Out there on the streets, and down there in the subway stations, mostly there were just a lot of people trying to get through the day. The hand that held the door open for me was just as likely to be black as white. The person who first told me there was something fishy about Tawana Brawley's story was a black co-worker. And when groups of young men marauded through a subway car, I can tell you I didn't give a shit what color they were...they were all equally scary! The fact is that people in a city know they need to get a long, and they try their best, most of the time, to keep their heads down and out of trouble, and not to expose their darker sides, if they have them.

Well, the L.A. of the movie Crash is an L.A. where apparently every single person has some kind of race-Tourettes...blurting out whatever damn stereotype they please. They're mostly educated intelligent people who, therefore, would know these utterances are socially unacceptable, and yet each character engages in the most obvious kind of vocal, verbal prejudice.

SPOILERS-DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU
It rang so false to me. And so, preachy. Yes, we're all good, and we're all bad. But I'm sorry, we're not all bad like carjacking-bad. And we're not all bad like finger-fucking-a-woman-we've-pulled-over bad. And it became actually predictable. Of course the black men complaining about racism will turn around and be criminals. Of course, the evil racist cop takes good care of his dad. Of course the "good" white cop kills a black boy. Of course the rich lady's friend won't interrupt a massage to help her friend who has fallen down the stairs. I mean, seriously. And of course you know as soon as the Hispanic locksmith starts talking about "impenetrability" that there's gonna be a gun shot involved. (I will say that the culmination of that scene was a surprise to me though, and that I'm so glad the locksmith didn't actually turn out to be a gangbanger...thank God!)

But generally you're meant to feel ooooh, it's all so gray. But in fact there wasn't really so much nuance. The grayness itself became black and white.

I admired a lot of elements of this movie, and it was certainly gripping the whole way through. I give it a thumbs up, but I wish that just one character managed to not be an asshole.

Buy Crash on Amazon.com

Posted: Tue - February 21, 2006 at 04:13 PM       EmailFeedback

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