Crash

Crash is, without a doubt, the worst film I have seen thus far in 2005. What an egregious oversimplification of the race issue in America. What a ridiculous over-ripe bit of hand-wringing posing as nuanced drama. I'm seriously embarrassed for writer-director Paul Haggis right now. Embarrassed.

After years of writing for TV, Haggis earned acclaim for his adapted screenplay for Million Dollar Baby. That was a well-constructed, if overwrought, genre script with an unfortunately melodramatic ending, one that didn't logically or tonally match up to the rest of the film.

Crash is a different beast entirely. Meant as a social message picture, examining the racial tensions that linger beneath the surface of Los Angeles, Crash is a silly collection of vignettes which have nothing to say about racism except (1) there's a lot of it, (2) it sucks and (3) it's not just the fault of white people like Paul Haggis, but everybody.



What Haggis seems to miss entirely is that Racism (capital R) exists in America as a social construct. Racism is not defined merely as white people clutching their purses tightly when they see groups of black men. That is an individual example of racist behavior. Shameful, yes, but organizational in nature, no. Racism is the cultural and systematic oppression of certain social groups by others. In America, typically monied whites oppressing everyone else.

Nowhere is this more clear than this week in Louisiana. What we have seen is the federal, state and local government purposefully ignoring the impoverished black citizens of New Orleans, allowing them to die needlessly over the course of 4 days. That's Racism. Mexican people getting into arguments with Persian shop owners...that's an unfortunate reality, but it's a pretty narrow definition for a whole film.

Okay, so maybe I'll give Paul Haggis the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his movie isn't even supposed to deal in the large issues of Racism in America. Maybe he just wanted to make a movie about why we can't all just get along, here, in 2005.

His movie's still a piece of shit. Because, like Million Dollar Baby, like most movies dealing with difficult, sensitive issues like racism, Crash can't resist the oversimplification. It can't resist. It's a movie decrying racist behavior in which every single character is a crude racist stereotype and everyone encounter is meant to relate simplistic, generic "racist" attitudes in a negative light. (Helping others of different skin color, good! Using power to reinforce negative concepts, bad!)

The film is presented as a series of interlocking stories, occuring within a 24 hour period. Various characters of different races are thrust together by circumstance, often because of a car crash, and their encounters come to change their attitudes about themselves and their place in the world.

Let's take a look at some of the characters we follow around:

-Detective Waters (Don Cheadle), a black cop with a junkie mother and a junkie brother on the run from the law. He's being asked by the LAPD to lie about an investigation so that a racist white cop can be locked up for a crime he may not have committed against a black cop.

-Sgt. Ryan (Matt Dillon), a racist white cop and bully who, after being annoyed by a black customer service representative named Shaniqua (Loretta Devine), takes it out on a professional black couple (Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton) he pulls over for a traffic violation.

Better yet, the husband, played by hot actor Terrence Howard, directs a racist TV show starring Tony Danza! The cop fingers the wife's genitals and then makes the husband supplicate to him, all in front of his rookie partner (Ryan Phillipe), in one of the film's many scenes that cries out for some measure of subtlety and restraint.

I hate to say it, but this scene (as well as another one where Dillon gropes Newton for another reason) goes on so long, you question whether Haggis finds it maybe titilating, maybe in an inappropriate way. We get the message - this white cop expresses his power over Newton by groping her - about 1/3 of the way through the scene.

-Angry, paranoid Persian shop owner Farhad (Shaun Toub), who buys a gun without knowing how to use it, yells at his tattooed Latino locksmith (Michael Pena) and ignores everyone's advice. He repeatedly insists "this shop is all we have!"

-Obnoxious, self-absorbed trophy wife Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock), who is married to the district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and harps incessantly at her friendly, overweight Mexican housekeeper, whom she will later refer to as her "best friend," in a direct dialogue rip from Driving Miss Daisy, another awkward, embarrassing racist polemic about race.

-Two black thugs (Ludacris and Larenz Tate) who carjack white folks and then argue about why everyone hates black people. They also argue about whether or not country music is racist.

Do I need to keep going?

Let's talk more about those black thugs. Haggis thinks that, by giving Ludacris dialogue about how everyone thinks of black men as criminals, and about how hip hop passes on negative messages to black youth about criminality, that he somehow undoes the stereotype of casting a rapper as a criminal. It doesn't work. It's still racist. It just lets the audience know you're smart enough to know better.

Maybe if Haggis was a more inventive, thoughtful writer, some of this stuff would be more acceptable. But this script is obvious, clunky and above all gob-smackingly silly. SILLY! Now, I know LA has a reputation as a dangerous city full of criminals, high-speed pursuits, horrific car accidents, street crime and vandalism. But come on! Rarely to 4 or more of these things happen to the same people in a single night!

The movie relies on constant coincidences, some that absolutely stretch the limits of the film's reality. For example, Dillon and Phillipe are partners one night, when they pull over the black couple, and then they next day they are reassigned. Even so, Phillipe the next day runs into the husband (Howard) and Dillon runs into the wife (Newton) at almost exactly the same time in different parts of the city.

And I haven't even talked about the random explosions, fires, shootings, vans full of smuggled-in Asian slaves, dead siblings, murder investigations, Internal Affairs investigations, a goofy slip and fall down the stairs and repeated verbal attacks on HMOs and the insurance industry. This would be enough material for an entire season of "Dragnet," yet Haggis crams it all into one 24 hour period.

After about a half hour, I thought the movie was stupid. After an hour, I thought it was retarded. Once it was over, I thought it was definitely the dumbest movie I'll see this year.

Haggis utterly fails to understand that the most pernicious racism, and almost all contemporary urban racism, is under the surface. Repressed. Comes out among people when they are alone, or at least safely within the confines of their own communities, away from the actual people they are insulting. When it comes out, it happens quickly, in a flash, as in the LA riots.

People don't usually walk around saying racist things loudly to one another in public. If they do, repeatedly, people soon assume they are crazy and stop taking them seriously. Every character in this film repeatedly insults other people in terms of race, or says blatantly offensive things to their face. Is this how Haggis really feels? Does he think constantly in terms of racial epithets?

"You black people...You must be upset about how these stupid trigger-happy negroes give you all a bad reputation!"

"Why do they always think I'm Arab! I am Persian!"

"Mom, I can't talk to you now. I'm having sex with a white girl."

"You're telling me there's a Chinaman trapped under the car?"

I think his concept was to show each character being both the perpetrator and victim of racism. Cheadle offends his Latin girlfriend by calling her Mexican when she's a mixture of Puerto Rican and El Salvadoran, but he is then offended when references are made to his wayward, junkie brother. Dillon is a bully, a racist white cop, but we find out his father lost his business because of loans made to black businesses.

Phillippe does the right thing and reports his racist partner, but later comes to commit violence against a black man due to a misunderstanding. Ludacris steals from whites, but comes to, I swear, free a van full of imported Asian slaves, and then smiles to himself...Cause he did a good thing...Awwww.....

But that's not depth. That's insulting. It implies that racism is everyone's fault, that it's a facet of all of our lives and of the society in which we live, and that until we all purge it from our own souls it will live on infinitely. What bullshit. As if the infrastructure of our society has nothing to do with it. As if racism is solely a psychological problem.

And even so, the movie's final half hour seems to conclude that, when people are helped by those of other races, when they cut down the barriers between one another, the racism just ends. Bullock realizes Mexicans are A-OK when one helps her after a nasty spill. Newton appreciates whiteness again when her life is saved by a white guy. Phillippe saves a black man, making up for his inability to save the black man at the traffic stop.

What rubbish. That's not life, people. You don't get to right the wrongs you do through good manners, and not every act of racism is repaid in kind. It's bullshit. Racism is very real, and good feelings won't make it go away. It is a function of the way we live, and an interesting movie might try to get at the heart of why we have these feelings, where they come from, how this anger gets channeled and re-channeled, and how the power structure and daily operations of the city of Los Angeles and the nation of America feed the racism expressed interpersonally.

But Crash sure isn't that movie. It's a horribly unpleasant, pedestrian and preachy piece of trash, a woefully juvenile take on racism from a guy who, it seems to me, hasn't really even done that much thought on the subject.

I realize I have written for quite some time, and haven't really talked about it in terms of the movie. I've just kind of harped on Haggis' script. Well, the direction sucks too. It's obvious he's going for kind of a Soderbergh-Traffic effect here. Telling a story about a complex modern issue by showing facets of the issue and how they affect a variety of interlocked characters.

He even rips of Soderbergh's use of various filters and lenses at different locations, to constantly shift the film's look. Haggis takes it one step further and shifts lenses and filters sometimes halfway through a scene, to give you multiple impressions of the same sequence. Why? I don't know. It's jarring and obnoxious, like if he put in subtitles announcing "Hey, check it out, I'm directing here! Isn't that awesome direction, how I changed the colors like that?"

The music by Mark Isham is similarly proud of itself. This is one of those "serious" scores, where there's no recognizable theme or even real music, just stray notes of different tones, struck occasionally to remind you you're watching a film that's terribly, terribly serious.

Man, I hated this movie. What an immense waste of time. Haggis, you better come with something very strong next, or I'm writing you off entirely.