I skipped the movie Crash for the longest while, but I knew more or less what it was: it was the movie that beat out Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, a move that I always saw as Hollywood, the supposed home of liberal values, taking the safe route and awarding the movie with the message everyone more or less agreed with (“Racism is bad!”) and not to the one that had an, at the time, more radical message about the tragic love between two men. The one other thing I knew was it played a somewhat prominent role in writer/director Paul Haggis’s decision to leave the Church of Scientology as outlined in the book Going Clear.
Also, I heard it wasn’t all that good. But I figured it was best to decide that for myself before it too left HBO Max.
Featuring an all-star cast that includes the likes of Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Micahel Pena, Brendan Fraser, Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, and Ryan Phillippe, the movie follows multiple characters around Los Angeles around Christmas time as they either make or hear racist language. Some, like Bullock’s privileged rich woman or Dillon’s cop, are worse than others, and Haggis does have a very diverse cast on his hands. So, most of the first half is showing how racism affects the various characters.
Then around the halfway point, there’s a crash where Newton’s character is trapped and Dillon’s cop, who had harassed her earlier, selflessly rescues her from her burning car before it explodes. From there, the movie shows some of the uglier people, like Bullock’s character, are a bit more complex than “They’re just racist!” and some of the seemingly nicer characters are shown to be, well, worse. And then the movie ends with a suggestion that racism is everywhere and the cycle will keep going until…we stop it, I guess.
So, was this movie deserving of Best Picture? Not by a long shot. Beyond Brokeback Mountain, it was also up against Capote with its strong central performance from Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Stephen Spielberg’s haunting meditation on violence and justice Munich, and George Clooney’s second directorial effort with Good Night and Good Luck. Granted, I have only seen two of those (Brokeback and Capote), but the other two had much stronger reputations at the very least. And I will get to at least Munich one of these days. In Crash‘s favor is a very strong ensemble cast, and there are no bad performances on hand though there aren’t any great ones either. Haggis also does some good work cutting between characters and stories, interweaving them in a high effective way.
But at the same time, the movie feels shallow. Racism, its causes, or even how to define it, is a fairly complex problem. Movies like Crash at least feint in the direction that even people who seem like little better than irredeemable racists are still people and people are complex, and the movie doesn’t exactly offer a solution for the problem of racism. But all at once, the movie still feels shallow, suggesting racism is limited to language for the most part and not a systemic problem that goes deeper than people. And for all that the actors do give good performances, the script still doesn’t give them a whole lot to work with all the same. The end result is a movie with a good message that is hardly shocking and doesn’t really do much to advance the conversation.
Grade: C
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