CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Crash

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

this entry brought to you by sleater-kinney, "hot rock"




If you didn't know what Best Picture Oscar winner Crash was about going into it, you'll know it's about racism in the opening scene as a hispanic woman and an asian lady exchange racial barbs with one another at the scene of a car accident. And then, in case you weren't sure, it reminds you just a moment later, when two black men argue over whether their lack of service at a restaurant was racially motivated or not. And again, in case you simply weren't paying attention, in the next scene, when a yuppie that has just been the victim of a crime, loudly complains of not trusting the hispanic locksmith she hired and wanting a new lock installed the next day. In fact, if you had short-term memory loss like the main character in Memento and couldn't remember anything from 15 minutes prior, there isn't a single point in Crash where you wouldn't know it's about racism.

Crash is the kind of movie that Hollywood loves to congratulate itself over, but rarely gets made, and for his ambition first time director Paul Haggis should be commended. It's a movie about social issues, and it shows no bias: even characters you are clearly intended to hate are shown as nothing more or less than human. The reason this kind of movie rarely gets made is because it's difficult to tell the right kind of story without preaching, and if it's one thing that people supposedly hate, it's being preached at, and preachiness can come from an overall theme being too overbearingly explained. However, without enough of an overall driving message, a movie can become worse than preachy: it can become tedious. This balance is tricky to pull off, and, unfortunately, it's one that Crash does not.

Paul Haggis' script is so flawed that I cannot imagine it not coming off as well intentioned but hackneyed if you were to sit down and read it. While Haggis has a keen ear for natural dialogue, nearly every single scene in the movie is centered on racism in some form. After a while, it feels like every single line of dialogue is directly about racism, and if not, leading up to racism. One begins to wonder how many times Haggis went back over his script, trying to write more racism into each progressive draft. It's one thing to drive a point home, but with Crash, anything not driving the point home seems to be completely excised. There were only two scenes that I can remember that didn't directly have to do with racism. A hispanic man, after a hard days' work, comes home and finds his daughter sleeping under the bed, and he has a tender moment comforting her. In another scene, a cop, worried about his mother who is losing her mind, quietly creeps into her house and restocks her nearly-empty refrigerator. These kinds of character motivated scenes are almost completely nonexistent and are sorely needed to give the characters needed depth and direction. As it is, in place of non-racial character development, the script goes out of its way, to the point of contrivance, of making every character with a speaking role be connected to other characters. Frankly, the movie would have been better off if there had been less of this convulated tendency of connecting all the stories, if there had been a couple less characters, and more time had been spent getting to know them, so generic Middle Eastern shopkeeper, yuppie wife, and token rookie cop who is uncomfortable with the department's seedy underbelly didn't come off quite as stock.

The big problem here is that the movie is preaching to the choir. Any person who is going to want to watch an Oscar winning drama about race relations already knows racism is bad and everywhere, and the movie presents nothing out of the ordinary about the issue to get people thinking beyond what they already knew. It's obvious Haggis was attempting to go for the bigger issue that everyday racism will get the audience to relate more, but ends up missing his intended effect. We all know that there are racist cops. We all know that yuppies take their houseworkers for granted. We all know elected officials use minorities to make themselves look better. Consequently, every plot device brought up has a completely predictable conclusion. When one character goes out and buys a gun at the beginning of the movie, you already know, even before any conflict comes up, that he's going to end up shooting someone with it, and it's going to be someone who doesn't deserve it, because that's the kind of movie this is.

With all this said, Crash still managed to be imminently watchable, and even, at times, gripping, because it turns out Haggis is a really good director on his first time out, he has the most stellar ensemble cast since Traffic, and he gets incredible performances out of every single one of them. Don Cheadle is subtle and worried and completely compelling as usual, Matt Dillon gives much more character to the racist cop than the script neccesarily asked for, and Terrance Howard, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors, is completely dripping inner confliction as a black TV director having the worst day of his life. Worth noting is Ludacris, who doesn't exactly play out of his type as a young, articulate car-jacker, but ends up being much more compelling than I expected.

In the end, the movie is good, but not at all because of the social relevence it attempted to bludgeon us with and that fans of the movie completely fell in love with (enough so to make it named Best Movie of the Year), but because it has the elements of a good movie: good, honest, hardworking directing with an eye for what exactly needs to be shown on screen, gorgeous cinematography, and fantastically talented cast acting like they believe it. The script? It was just there as a loose framework for the real talent to run with.
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with love from CRS @ 11:21 PM 

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