Crash (2004, USA)

Paul Haggis’ Crash has risen to the top of many critical top-10 lists, and even earned itself an Oscar win for Best Picture. This acclaim has been won through the film’s supposedly “unflinching” look at contemporary American race relations. Set over the course of a few days in Los Angeles, Crash’s multicultural, multiracial characters all have strong words for their black/white/Latino/Asian/Arab neighbors. This turns out to be a specific problem – what does an audience do with a film when every character in it is racist? The effect is not only alienating and reductive, but leaves us with only one or two, if any, at all sympathetic characters.

This problem is compounded by simple abundance – with so many people moving so quickly in and out of scenes, it is impossible to create characters with enough internal life to separate them from their racist tendencies. William Fichtner, a very good character actor, actually shared in an ensemble SAG award for his participation in one 5-minute scene. This generally fine group of actors does their best with the material – Terrence Howard is particularly skilled at fleshing out a slim, superficial character – but the short running time and enormous cast doesn’t allow for development of even the characters of marquee stars like Sandra Bullock and Don Cheadle. With this all-pervading lack, the audience can do little more than assume that racism is grounded at birth, a facile and unproven theory at best.

The closest possible example of what the filmmakers were attempting with Crash might be that juggernaut of spoiled Southern Californian life, Magnolia. Despite that film’s own internal problems, Haggis could have taken a lesson or two from P.T. Anderson, or if he set his sights higher, Robert Altman, on how to adequately structure a film this complex. As it is, Crash merely pays lip service to a heady amount of white liberal guilt, and in the end, its themes don’t delve much deeper than a high school civics class. For a really interesting take on urban racism in America, in Los Angeles even, you can get four episodes of FX’s drama series The Shield for the same rental price.