Crash (2005)
Is it a biopic of Ray Corrigan?
Nah.
It's "Short Cuts" meets "Two Days in the Valley" meets
"Grand Canyon" meets "Pulp Fiction" meets "Magnolia" - which is to
say it is an episodic ensemble drama which takes place over a short
period of time and features unrelated lives which are somehow mysteriously and
fortuitously interconnected.
Yes, this
technique has been overused. And, yes, the concept can lacks credibility when
everyone keeps running into everyone else in a metropolitan area of
ten million people. But you have to realize that this is no longer a
trope or a device, but merely a screen convention. Is it believable
that two Nazi officers speak to one another in English? Of course
not. We accept it because it is an accepted convention of English
language films. There are several ways to do it, and we accept all
of them.
In some movies they speak German with subtitles. In other movies,
they speak English with German accents. In other movies, they simply
speak the English of native English speakers. Neither of the last
two options is believable, but we accept those choices because they are
conventional. The same is true of the coincidences in these ensemble
dramas. We just accept the fact that any given dozen people in L.A.
will not only run into one of the other twelve, but possibly several
of them. Face it, dude, if I choose you as one of my twelve
people to focus on, there is nothing you can do to avoid meeting the other
eleven. It works just like in that Final Destination movie - your
destiny is sealed. Even if you decide to stay home in bed all day,
one of the twelve will come to the door to sell you Grit Magazine;
another will fly a private plane through your second story window; a third
will arrive with the paramedics who respond to the plane crash; and
so forth. It is also noteworthy that the other eleven will not only
run into you, but into one another as well. The kid selling Grit
will be the nephew of the pilot, and will sell a subscription to the
paramedic.
That's a wacky ol' thang I like to call Karakter
Kismet.
I blame Thonton Wilder for this convention.
"Thornton Wilder? There's a blast from the past!
Wasn't he a great playwright and novelist from many decades ago?"
Yup, but he's the man to blame. Last week I blamed
Eugene O'Neill and his play Strange Interlude for all the
unnecessary gimmicks used in "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers"
to reveal the thoughts of the characters. This time I blame Thornton
Wilder and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" for all the mysterious
interconnections that permeate ensemble dramas. That book featured a
humble monk who decided to investigate the lives of some people
killed together while crossing a collapsing bridge. He wanted to determine
why God had chosen those particular people to die that day. He spent
five years researching five people who were crossing a bridge on the
same day and found the highly dreaded "mysterious interconnections."
Since Wilder was a great writer, he was able to use the technique to
create a Pulitzer winning novel, and in the end the interconnections
really meant nothing at all. The monk abandoned his quest for the
link between them, set aside all thoughts of the meaning of their
deaths, and decided to write about the meaning of their lives:
"Almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita but myself. Soon we
shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and
we ourselves should be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love
will have been enough."
Unfortunately, very few of us remember the beauty
and depth of Wilder's story, but the goddamned mysterious
interconnections live on.
This is yet further proof of my hypothesis that
great playwrights can be blamed for everything which can not be
blamed on the Bossa Nova. It always boils down to that choice. Let's
say you get fired from your cushy job as a drawbridge oiler. Maybe
your wife ran away with her tango instructor, a guy named Raoul with
a pencil-thin moustache. You could blame yourself, but you should
not. The culprit is either George Bernard Shaw or the Bossa Nova.
In defense of Crash, it does earn the right to use
the much despised mysterious interconnections because there is
actually a point to it. The film posits that we seem to hate one
another all too often, and yet we depend on one another.
Sophisticated Thandie Newton hates the racist white cop who once felt her
up under the flimsy pretense of a weapon pat-down, and yet the same
cop later saves her life after an auto accident, by willingly
assuming a risk to his own life that he might have avoided. How
should she feel about him then? She hated him. She needed him.
Perhaps she later hated the fact that she needed him.
Crash is about racism, but not about the kind of
racism that causes us to jail or even hang strangers for their skin
color, but about the kind of racism that permeates the everyday
lives of most of us. What small, unarmed white woman, no matter how
liberal and sophisticated her thinking, has not felt fear at walking
alone on a deserted city street directly toward two large young
black men? Would she feel the same fear if they were white? If the
answer is no, it's racism, and most of us are guilty of it. Oh,
don't act blameless. You are guilty of it as well, no matter who you
are. Yesterday I was in a convenience store, expecting to have to
explain a complicated request to the clerk in words he would
understand. I didn't know the guy, but my mind worked in that
direction because he had an Asian face. As it turns out, he was a
Japanese-American college student who spoke English approximately as
well as William F. Buckley Jr, but that isn't really germane. He might
have turned out to be incapable of understanding me, just as I
anticipated, but my point would still be the same. I assumed he
would be unable to speak English only because he looked Asian. If he
had been a blond guy in the same job, I would have assumed no such
problem. That's what prejudice is all about. The word itself means
"to judge in advance" - to assume that an individual will behave a
certain way because he or she is a member of a certain group.
This kind of racism is an important part of our
social conditioning. How many times in high school were you reminded
that your school was better than Such-and-such Academy? How many
times did you start a sentence with "kids from that school are ..."
This social conditioning is nothing uniquely American. As an
American expatriate for many years, I can't tell you how many times
I heard how "you Yanks" or "you Americans" think. What the hell is
that all about, anyway? Am I supposed to think like Darth Cheney or
Good Time Ralphie Nader? We seem to want to validate ourselves by
believing that the group we belong to is the best one. Not merely
"as good as" the others, but better. Perhaps it is because we are
unhappy with our personal accomplishments and need the vicarious
superiority of the group we belong to or would like to belong to. Or
not. What the hell do I know? Ask Dr. Phucking Phil.
At any rate, Crash is about that kind of racism,
the kind of assumptions we make about individuals. Ryan Phillippe
plays a liberal cop who ends up shooting a black hitchhiker because
a situation escalates from a simple misunderstanding - he gets
irritated and distrustful because the black man says he loves ice
hockey and country music. Phillippe assumes that he's being
ridiculed, and an atmosphere of antagonism develops. As it turns
out, the black guy was speaking without irony, but who would have
guessed? We make assumptions. Even good people. The film goes to
great pains to establish that Phillippe is a compassionate liberal
man, then ends up turning him into a murderer for having made the
wrong assumptions about a black man. The film goes to great pains to
establish that even the "bad cop" (Matt Dillon) is a good man deep
inside, a guy who risks his life for people and cares tenderly for
his dad. Yet he is filled with racist assumptions which in his case
are very close to the surface. Those assumptions are a part of our
lives, not because we are evil, but because, as the old song goes,
"you've got to be carefully taught" to be a racist, and our society
teaches us well.
I don't love this movie the way some of the
critics do (Ebert: ★★★★), but I like it. Assuming you have no problem
accepting the much abhorred "mysterious interconnections"
convention, it packs a lot of emotional punch, and I liked the fact
that it used humor to lighten the load of the ongoing ominous music
and Greek Tragedy plotting.
I really enjoyed the banter between Ludacris and Larenz Tate as two
intelligent black carjackers who are always bickering about how
black males fit into society. They function as kind of a Greek
chorus for the film, and provide the kind of funny, everyday
insights that Travolta and Jackson provided in Pulp Fiction. The
film could have used more of that humor, especially from the
non-black characters. Are black people the only Americans with a
sense of humor?
The director is named James Haggis, so Crash is without a doubt the best film ever
directed by a man named after a
Scottish specialty food, and also best among all animal offal
food theme films of
the past year. The Haggis film is rated 8.5 at IMDb, edging out last year's
Scrapple (7.6).
Crash may have been the best word of mouth film of 2005. As I type
this, it has grossed $52 million, despite taking in only $9 million on opening
weekend, and never reaching as many as 2000 screens. It actually did better in
its fifth week than it did in its fourth. Most films take in between 3x
and 4x their opening weekend. Films significantly below 3x generally suffer from
bad word of mouth (Gigli had something like 1.6x), while films significantly
higher than 3x are built by the whisper network. (My Big Fat Greek Wedding
pulled in 80x!) Crash will finish with 6x. I think the only other major
non-children's movie above 4x this year is Hitch, so Crash won that race going
away. It is the only 2005 film to reach $50 million with an opening weekend
below $10 million.
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