Best Picture: #78
Original Release Date: May 6, 2005 (with a September 10, 2004 release at the Toronto Film Festival)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 52 minutes
Director: Paul Haggis
Quick Impressions:
It’s possible that Crash is my least favorite Best Picture winner. (My friends always seem shocked when I suggest that I don’t like something. I’ve had multiple people tell me, “You like everything.” (I assure you, I don’t.) (I just don’t watch things I don’t like!)
(That’s not true! I’ve watched Magnolia so many times!)
Back in 2005, I wasn’t too thrilled with any of the nominees for Best Picture (except Good Night and Good Luck which I loved and paired with Do the Right Thing to create an essay assignment for the rhetoric course I was teaching at the time).
My husband and I started dating seriously that March (after meeting at a Halloween party the fall before). He had never watched movies that got nominated for non-technical Academy Awards before knowing me. 2005 was his introduction to Oscar movies. So he was really amused by the Statler and Waldorf video circulating at the time that said, “This year’s Best Picture winner is sure to be dark and depressing.” (That might not be the exact quote. I can’t find the clip.)
That was an exceptionally dark, depressing crop of Best Picture nominees. They’re all good films, but most of them have grim, harrowing storylines. (Capote, Munich? These are not movies you watch to brighten your mood.) (You know what did brighten my mood, though? When Itzhak Perlman played excerpts from the nominated scores, and my husband remarked—earnestly, appreciatively—“You know, this violinist plays very well!” (Nobody ever said things like that to me in grad school! You’d never trip up my husband with one of those famous-musicians-in-the-subway experiments. He’d be right there, missing his train, entranced.)
At the time, I had trouble embracing Crash because a lot of people thought Brokeback Mountain should win, and I was one of them. Like I said, personally, I enjoyed watching Good Night and Good Luck the most, but it’s very off-putting to hear rumor after rumor that Academy members are voting for Crash because they don’t want to vote for “the gay cowboy movie.” (And somehow Ernest Borgnine became such a scapegoat, as if he had single-handedly torpedoed the movie’s Best Picture chances and was the only person who voted against it, causing the Crash upset.)
On red carpet specials leading up to the ceremony, I heard so many variations of, “It’s surprising and important to realize that racism still exists in America today.” I mean, that’s disingenuous. Come on. (People would say things like that, and I would hear, “I didn’t want to vote for the gay cowboy movie” or “I’m secretly embarrassed we didn’t vote for the gay cowboy movie.”) I’ll acknowledge that wasn’t fair of me. I’m sure many people were being sincere. And Crash probably did resonate with Oscar voters who lived in LA and had experienced or witnessed blatant racism there.
But the whole debacle of Crash stealing Best Picture began to exhaust me emotionally. (Who in the world didn’t know there was racism in America in 2005?) I didn’t even like Brokeback Mountain that much, but by the end of the evening, I thought it had been robbed, too! (And I was also mad I felt that way because I sensed I was being manipulated into feeling outrage.) (At least hearing Jack Nicholson say, “Capotay,” for no apparent reason was kind of fun (like a precursor to Adele Dazeem!)
My husband liked Crash, but he hadn’t seen Brokeback Mountain. That’s the only one of the five we didn’t see together because friends had invited me on a weekend when he was unable to come along. (Brokeback Mountain is good, but not for your three-year-old child.) Though it’s not a perfect film itself, as an artistic achievement, Brokeback Mountain is stronger than Crash. I still think so.
All that said, though, I do kind of like Crash. (By writing out all of these complaints, I’ve awakened a desire to defend the film.) It actually has many strengths. I’ll talk about those first.
The Good:
Crash does clearly illustrate the way our behavior alters the outlooks (and ultimately the actions) of the people with whom we interact. This was a popular topic in the early 2000s. (I’m thinking of movies like Pay It Forward and The Butterfly Effect. Plus in 2000, I read The Brothers Karamazov, in which Father Zosima says,“All are responsible for all.” I used to spend hours talking about that concept with a close friend of mine.)
Crash certainly delivers on its premise, and you’re not left scratching your head, wondering, “What am I to make of this?” The point is commendably clear. In Crash, again and again, people collide, and their interactions affect the subsequent behavior of everyone involved.
I approve of this message. Sometimes it’s good to have the concept reinforced for us. If we treat people badly, they will feel badly, and those negative feelings will influence their future actions. Do you want to put ripples of negativity out into the universe (or even just the greater Los Angeles area)? I don’t! (I even worry about stupid things like, “What if Paul Haggis somehow reads this review, and he’s crushed?” which is ridiculous on multiple levels.)
The phenomenon Crash illustrates (again and again and again) is real. Human beings are social creatures. We’re interconnected. And sometimes the tiniest things change the course of our thoughts and feelings. And our thoughts and feelings give rise to our actions. One unkind word or deed can ripple out into the world with a terrifying reach.
In 2005, I judged Sandra Bullock’s character way too harshly (even though I was delighted to see Bullock playing someone so unpleasant and against type. I thought it might help her continue to have a flourishing career.) Bullock’s character is deeply unpleasant, yes, but we’re not getting her on a typical day. She’s just been carjacked. (That’s traumatic!)
Pretty much everyone in the movie is having a bad day because of the actions of the other characters.
Crash gets another thing right, too. No one is wholly good or evil. No one is always the victim or always the aggressor. Our circumstances change throughout our lives (even throughout the day). Whether we’ve done good or evil must be taken encounter by encounter. A bully can be bullied. A victim can victimize. Someone hated can hate. And everyone’s a little bit racist. (Avenue Q makes this point in a much more fun way, but it’s probably helpful to audiences to see that the world isn’t made up of us (the good guys) and them (the bad guys). It’s more like us versus our own worse selves.
In general, I’m a fan of narratives with myriad interconnected storylines where characters’ paths converge (and often converge again) at unpredictable points. I love stuff like that, and Crash does serve up several late-in-the-film surprises when we see that even more points of connection exist among this set of characters than we initially realized. People we thought we had figured out have hidden complexities, dimensions we did not perceive because we lacked information.
In fact, I’d say that the second half of Crash is a fairly strong film. (It’s the film’s first hour or so that doesn’t work as well for me, but I’ll talk about that later.)
On this watch, I realized that I do like the messiness of the characters. For a film that I keep wanting to denounce as heavy-handed, obvious, and repetitive, Crash actually offers us characters that are some of the messiest you will find in cinema. And it doesn’t try to clean up that mess for us at all. So even though I watch and sense too much bluntness and hand-holding with the basic concept, I must acknowledge that how we feel about each complex character is something we have to decide entirely for ourselves.
I’ll talk about a few of the characters now, so there will be spoilers here. If you haven’t seen Crash, you might want to skip to the Best Scene section.
Matt Dillon gives a good performance in this movie, but the character he plays seems even worse to me now than he did in 2005. Back then, I remember a discussion around Officer Ryan’s “moment of redemption” when he pulls Thandiwe Newton out of the burning car. I remember people (on TV and on message boards) saying, “So we see he really is a good guy at heart, and he shows that here.” I was never sold on that reading at the time. Now I can’t even entertain it. I mean, think of this from the point of view of Thandiwe Newton’s character. First she’s sexually assaulted by a police officer. Then she’s in a horrible car wreck, and she has no choice but to let the man who assaulted her rescue her. She’s doubly traumatized. (And now she must have such conflicted feelings because the person who saved her life is the person who hurt her.) She will not recover from this quickly.
Admittedly, what happens with the insurance agent is a little different. Officer Ryan’s behavior with Shaniqua (Loretta Devine) is boorish, overbearing, offensive, (blatantly, bafflingly) racist, and ultimately self-defeating. (His idiocy in that scene is staggering. He’s clearly so racist (and resentful) that he sees no reason to disguise his objectionable views even when asking someone of the race he’s lambasting for help in a face-to-face conversation.) From my point of view, Ryan’s very self-sabotaging idiocy somewhat excuses his behavior there. (I’m not saying that his behavior is justifiable on any level, just that he’s clearly a complete moron. If someone that self-sabotaging came asking for my help, I might feel morally obligated to meet him more than halfway because of his painfully obvious inability to advocate for himself properly. (Shaniqua frustrates me in that scene, too. Someone treats her as disrespectfully as Officer Ryan, and yet she still finds a way to be partially in the wrong herself. It would be entirely possible for her to have Officer Ryan thrown out and help his father (which is her job).)
My point is, Ryan’s behavior in his encounter with Shaniqua (though atrocious) seems like something he could overcome and atone for through an act of heroism (that makes him see the humanity in a desperate person and rethink his past stances). But even if he does rescue Thandiwe Newton’s character from a burning car (which is part of his job as a police officer), he still sexually assaulted her the day before (which I’m pretty sure is not how he’s supposed to behave on the job). No matter how many people he saves from burning cars, there’s a big difference between having misguided, offensive views and sexually assaulting someone. No matter how many lives he saves, Ryan still abuses power to terrorize minorities and sexually assault women. And yet, he sincerely does love his father. He takes care of him and pities his suffering. He abuses his power to sexually assault women, and he loves his father. And we, the audience, just have to live with that. When we walk out of the movie, it’s up to us to decide what we think of Matt Dillon’s character.
Officer Ryan is one glaring, heavily showcased example, but most characters in the movie are similarly messy. (They’re bad people who do good things, good people who do bad things, ambivalent people who do ambiguous things. Very few characters are entirely sympathetic and always in the right.) And I like the messy characters. I do.
I also like the neat rhyme of many of Crash’s plot threads (rhyme in the sense that they correspond with one another and work in harmony). For whatever reason, I find the family who run the store almost always sympathetic. Even though Farhad (Shaun Toub) can be rude and violent, there’s such a sweetness to him. He comes very close to killing Michael Peña (who plays one of the least offending people in the film, Daniel, the locksmith). Farhad attempts to shoot Daniel, but Daniel’s young daughter rushes out unexpectedly to hug her father just as Farhad fires the gun. To everyone’s baffled amazement (including my daughter’s) the little girl isn’t killed. She believes this is because she has an invisible, bullet-proof cloak handed down from her father to protect her.
(“How can this make sense?” protested my daughter who remained baffled for several minutes, as the film intends.
“Everyone’s dead,” I joked. “They’ve been dead this entire time. They’re all ghosts. They don’t know they’re dead.”
I enjoyed her prolonged confusion. Back in 2005, this was by far my favorite part of the movie.)
Farhad believes that the little girl was an angel sent to save him. (“You just shot someone’s daughter!” my daughter yelled at him. “Don’t call her your angel. You suck!”)
I pointed out to her that while the little girl had actually acted to save her father, Farhad did have an angel, too, his own daughter, Doori (Bahar Soomekh). Though Farhad does not know it, when Doori bought bullets for him at his request, she deliberately chose blanks. (They’ve been conspicuously sitting around in a red box since the very beginning of the movie.)
(Incidentally, when I went to look up the name of the actress who plays Doori, I realized for the first time that her mother is played by Marina Sirtis, Counselor Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I really can’t believe I never noticed that before!)
Similarly, Detective Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) takes care of his difficult mother (Beverly Todd). Among other things, he brings her groceries and fills her refrigerator while she’s sleeping. But she’s angry with him for neglecting her and not taking care of his brother Peter (Larenz Tate). When Peter (a career criminal) is killed, Graham’s mother lashes out at him. She says that he never cared for her or for his brother and mournfully notes that the last thing Peter did was put groceries in her refrigerator while she was sleeping. She, too, misunderstands which child is acting as her angel. Like Doori, Graham does not reveal how much he has done to help his parent.
So though the film does harp on how bad behavior influences others to behave even worse, it also shows how good deeds—even when unknown, uncelebrated—cause astonishing ripples of goodness. And it seems to imply, too, that good deeds are their own reward. Performing a caring act for someone else, being someone’s angel is never the wrong thing to do (even though it works out better for Doori than for Graham).
Best Scene:
This is hard. I do sort of enjoy Matt Dillon’s character’s increasingly horrible conversation with the insurance agent. (I joked to my daughter, “Why did he even come to this office if he was just going to say, ‘Now let me just be clear about one thing up front. I’m in the KKK.’) I just find it so baffling that he thinks what he says to her in this scene is going to help his father. We’ve already seen him do some very bad things. If he abuses his power that way on the job, then you’d think on some level he’s a fairly evil person. But then why is he so…? I don’t even know the word for this behavior. You’d think someone so openly thrilled by the abuse of power would also lie to the insurance agent to get what he wants. It’s very strange to me that he believes in the rightness of his cause so sincerely that he expects her to sympathize with him when he uses this approach. I’ve been amazed by this a lot recently, that people who seem so evil and conniving can also be so stupid. (One nice thing is that he does become pitiable here. I do feel for his father. And I feel sorry for him that he doesn’t seem to understand how much his own enemy he is, or how warped his understanding of reality is.)
Also thrilling to watch is the carjacking-gone-wrong scene that builds and builds with Terrence Howard, Ludacris, and (eventually) Ryan Phillippe.
In general, I do like to spend time with Ludacris and Larenz Tate because their characters have a good rapport. (So many scenes in this film involve people yelling hatefully at their scene partners.)
Best Scene Visually:
That red box of bullets is certainly eye catching early on. And then, of course, at the moment when Farhad fires the gun, we get a look at the little girl’s red barrette, and then almost immediately see her mother’s red shirt. That scene is probably most gripping visually simply because of its baffling ending (that is not immediately explained to us).
I’ve also always kind of liked the scene when Ludacris takes the bus. I like to watch him look around and take stock of the situation. (I joked to my daughter, “He’s like, ‘Hey! The bus isn’t so bad!’ He’s the Grinch of the bus, leaning the true meaning of community!”)
Best Action Sequence:
Certainly the film’s most showcased action sequence occurs when Thandiwe Newton’s character gets trapped inside a burning car. (I really did not consider in 2005 just how traumatic this must be from her point of view. The night before, she has to let a man reach between her legs and grope her because if she doesn’t, her husband may die. This time, she has to let the same man reach into her car and grab her because if she doesn’t, she will die. What an awful week she’s having! She’ll be in therapy for years just to deal with these related incidents.) (And I mean, yeah, he saves her, so she’s supposed to be grateful. But it’s possible if he hadn’t traumatized her the night before, she wouldn’t get into this wreck in the first place!)
The Negatives:
There’s an artlessness to the beginning of Crash that I just can’t stand. The negativity and racism are just too intense, too relentless, too clumsily highlighted. This isn’t an average day in LA. For at least the first forty-five minutes, we get a non-stop barrage of quick cuts of what feels like everyone in the city at their worst and most racist moments. It’s exhausting (and certainly not fun to watch at Christmas time which is probably why it took us forever to finish this movie. We took a long break.) (It also doesn’t seem very realistic. I was in LA twice last year, and there were not people yelling loud, racist insults on every corner.)
Now to be fair, what I’m calling “artless” might actually be evidence of a carefully crafted screenplay by Paul Haggis. Opening the film with example after example of relentless hostility does help the audience understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of racism. Maybe you only make one (perhaps even unintentionally) racist remark. But your friend who is of that race hears stuff like that constantly because even if each person only says something like that once, the world is full of people.
Nevertheless, the first half of Crash is unpleasant to experience. Haggis also wrote the screenplay for 2004’s Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby. That film feels so calm, controlled, and carefully paced by comparison. This one cuts to a new set of characters every couple of minutes, and everyone is always yelling and being horrible. (There are an overwhelming number of characters, too. At one point, my daughter cried out in genuine alarm, “Who is this woman yelling in the hospital? I don’t even know this plot thread!” We eventually placed her, but this is one busy story!)
It’s not that I have so many complaints about Crash, honestly. It’s that the few problems I have with it are so pervasive. Non-stop tension and examples of racism that are, frankly, too pointed make the first half hour almost unwatchable. (And the next half hour is pretty stressful, too.) People’s behavior is glaringly bad at almost every second. If they seem about to lighten up, the story switches to another set of characters who are as angry and unpleasant as anyone could possibly be. The barrage of offensive yelling is relentless. And the emphasis on racism is so pointed that it reminds me of a parody of a filmstrip you’d watch in school or an After School Special.
I like the moral of Crash (and maybe even the concept of Crash), but for the most part, I don’t like the execution. (Even some scenes that I enjoy on the level of plot feel off to me in execution. I like the scene where Farhad fires the gun, but I don’t like all the slow-mo. It just doesn’t work for me. I don’t know how I would do it differently. (Maybe have the characters move faster, use less slow-mo?) I’m not saying I know how to improve the scene, just that it feels less effective than I’d like it to.)
As I said, back in 2005, my husband really liked Crash, and I thought it was okay. (I personally thought it was getting an undeservedly bad reputation because of how upset people were about the blatantly homophobic knee-jerk reactions some outspoken Oscar voters were having to Brokeback Mountain.) But when I started watching with my daughter, I immediately thought, “No. This is much worse than I remember.” The beginning of the film is so abrasive and so choppy! It has some good moments (and certainly many thought-provoking moments), but so many huge chunks of this movie are not enjoyable to watch for me. Some scenes are riveting, but the movie as a whole doesn’t quite work for me. Others may feel differently.
As we watched this time, I said to my daughter, “Usually I like stories where different sets of characters’ lives intersect at limited points, but I wish at least somebody were having a good day. This movie is making me more tense than Uncut Gems.” (Uncut Gems is great, but by the end of that movie, my entire body was sore from muscle tension, as if someone had beaten me with a bag of bricks for two hours. Crash is not actually quite that tense, but it’s still very stressful.)
Overall:
Crash features a talented ensemble of well-known stars delivering an edifying message of the surprising power of our words and actions (both positive and negative) in our every encounter. I like the theme of interconnectedness, and the reminder to treat people with kindness and consideration. And, of course, like most people, I agree that racism is a pervasive societal problem that harms us all. Still, the beginning of the movie is often so abrasive to watch that Crash will never be my favorite film. I’m sure it’s somebody’s favorite film, though. There’s a lot in it to appreciate.