Crash *** out of ****
Love it or hate it...here's your best picture
There are nine million stories in New York City. In Los Angeles, there's just one, and we're all a part of it.
The degrees of separation dwindle from six to two. Love, hate, crime, virtue, defeat, triumph - it's all part of the same soup in the desert under hazy skies. The best Los Angeles movies - "Chinatown," "LA Confidential," "Magnolia," "Short Cuts" - express that theme with large casts, a wide canvas, a feast of subplots and an operatic scheme.
"Crash" isn't quite cut from that cloth, but it belongs in the conversation, especially now that it's won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Writer-director Paul Haggis investigates racism under admittedly contrived, sensational circumstances, where villains become heroes and vice versa in one day. But the writing is strong and fierce, and the conflicts, while hyperboles, underline what's really going on out there - we're all pretty ticked off, nursing certain wounds, equally capable of cruelty and sympathy depending on who or what irritates that ulcer of discontent. Consider the characters long enough, and a more classic theme emerges - good vs evil, sin vs charity. Haggis is smart enough to know racism is a symptom, not the disease. Over two hours he slowly proves it.
The large ensemble includes Don Cheadle as a homicide detective, an unfavored son to his heroin-addicted mother; Matt Dillon as a racist cop watching his father die because of a crooked HMO; Ryan Phillippe as his partner; Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton as an upscale black couple targeted by Dillon's character one late night; Brendan Fraser as a too-race-conscious district attorney; Sandra Bullock as his trophy wife; Larenz Tate and Ludacris as carjackers ; and William Fichtner, in one of those deal-with-the-devil roles of sublime corruption in the name of sensible politics.
They mix, sometimes violently, curse and grapple, even redeem one another. The plot is cleverly spun, if a bit mythical, and worth discovering in the theater. Cheadle is the lead; though the cast is billed alphabetically, only Cheadle wanders through the entire picture. He's excellent again, cool, intellectual, at a distance from his family and his partner (Jennifer Esposito), who doubles as his lover. Not unlike other characters in "Crash," there is one thing particularly important to him, and his flaws keep him from quite protecting it. The same with Dillon's cop - he means well with his father, but his "white man's lament" so damages relations with the black HMO manager (Loretta Devine) that it nullfies his good intent. Newton and Bullock, in smaller roles, illuminate the necessity for marginalized wives to express the anger their prominent husbands cannot.
They're victims/villains, in a sense, able to articulate but not act, powerless in a structure that favors the male code of business. Nearly every major character, save one Latino locksmith(Michael Pena), seems to harbor some unjustified prejudice, and one of the weaknesses of "Crash" is that they speak of these in such blunt, vicious words. But it's also a strength: While racism in the 21st Century is subversive enough that we've developed ways of executing our prejudice without resorting to slurs, Haggis knows that, in a movie, a flashpoint must precede substance if it's going to reach a wide audience. A gotcha before the insight.
By the end Haggis has taken us through enough of these gotchas that we can telegraph the "surprise" twist, involving what was previously the movie's most upstanding, idealistic character. And I don't much buy that scene, sad and jarring as it is. But by that point you're wrapped up in "Crash," in its barking performances, Mark Isham's somber score and night setting, so that you reflect on a world whose misfortune, among others, is to fear what we don't know or understand, instead of embracing what we can.
"I wake up angry every morning," Bullock's character says at one point, and it's a summary statement for the whole tangled web. Directing it toward a skin tone or a foreign accent seems pretty dumb but, of course, when you're happy, waking up angry every morning does, too.
The degrees of separation dwindle from six to two. Love, hate, crime, virtue, defeat, triumph - it's all part of the same soup in the desert under hazy skies. The best Los Angeles movies - "Chinatown," "LA Confidential," "Magnolia," "Short Cuts" - express that theme with large casts, a wide canvas, a feast of subplots and an operatic scheme.
"Crash" isn't quite cut from that cloth, but it belongs in the conversation, especially now that it's won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Writer-director Paul Haggis investigates racism under admittedly contrived, sensational circumstances, where villains become heroes and vice versa in one day. But the writing is strong and fierce, and the conflicts, while hyperboles, underline what's really going on out there - we're all pretty ticked off, nursing certain wounds, equally capable of cruelty and sympathy depending on who or what irritates that ulcer of discontent. Consider the characters long enough, and a more classic theme emerges - good vs evil, sin vs charity. Haggis is smart enough to know racism is a symptom, not the disease. Over two hours he slowly proves it.
The large ensemble includes Don Cheadle as a homicide detective, an unfavored son to his heroin-addicted mother; Matt Dillon as a racist cop watching his father die because of a crooked HMO; Ryan Phillippe as his partner; Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton as an upscale black couple targeted by Dillon's character one late night; Brendan Fraser as a too-race-conscious district attorney; Sandra Bullock as his trophy wife; Larenz Tate and Ludacris as carjackers ; and William Fichtner, in one of those deal-with-the-devil roles of sublime corruption in the name of sensible politics.
They mix, sometimes violently, curse and grapple, even redeem one another. The plot is cleverly spun, if a bit mythical, and worth discovering in the theater. Cheadle is the lead; though the cast is billed alphabetically, only Cheadle wanders through the entire picture. He's excellent again, cool, intellectual, at a distance from his family and his partner (Jennifer Esposito), who doubles as his lover. Not unlike other characters in "Crash," there is one thing particularly important to him, and his flaws keep him from quite protecting it. The same with Dillon's cop - he means well with his father, but his "white man's lament" so damages relations with the black HMO manager (Loretta Devine) that it nullfies his good intent. Newton and Bullock, in smaller roles, illuminate the necessity for marginalized wives to express the anger their prominent husbands cannot.
They're victims/villains, in a sense, able to articulate but not act, powerless in a structure that favors the male code of business. Nearly every major character, save one Latino locksmith(Michael Pena), seems to harbor some unjustified prejudice, and one of the weaknesses of "Crash" is that they speak of these in such blunt, vicious words. But it's also a strength: While racism in the 21st Century is subversive enough that we've developed ways of executing our prejudice without resorting to slurs, Haggis knows that, in a movie, a flashpoint must precede substance if it's going to reach a wide audience. A gotcha before the insight.
By the end Haggis has taken us through enough of these gotchas that we can telegraph the "surprise" twist, involving what was previously the movie's most upstanding, idealistic character. And I don't much buy that scene, sad and jarring as it is. But by that point you're wrapped up in "Crash," in its barking performances, Mark Isham's somber score and night setting, so that you reflect on a world whose misfortune, among others, is to fear what we don't know or understand, instead of embracing what we can.
"I wake up angry every morning," Bullock's character says at one point, and it's a summary statement for the whole tangled web. Directing it toward a skin tone or a foreign accent seems pretty dumb but, of course, when you're happy, waking up angry every morning does, too.
posted by petalumafilmcenter @ 8:59 PM
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