Monday, May 16, 2005
Crash: Am I the only person who didn't love this film?
It looks like every year there is one film where my views go against public sentiment. I feel so isolated in my counter views that to convince myself that I’m not wrong I overanalyze my thoughts. Last year seemed to be one of the few that hated Millions Dollar Baby. This year it is another Paul Haggis written film: Crash. While I don’t hate Crash, I find much in the film to like and enjoy, it is a very average film and not anywhere close to the greatness tag many people have already bestowed on it.
I’m usually a fan of sociological films containing characters from multiple backgrounds whose lives intersect at random. Nashville, Grand Canyon, Short Cuts, and Magnolia are some of my favorite films of all-time. These films had an epic quality that does justice to their characters. Crash is nothing more than the racism filled rants in the Spike Lee films expanded out to 105 minutes.
105 minutes is far too short a time for the stories in Crash to be presented. It is barely time to tell a light comedy with four characters but here Paul Haggis had decided to construct a sweeping drama with at least twelve major characters. As he showed in Million Dollar Baby, he is anything but subtle. With so little time to allot to each character, each one must immediately spew out racial epitaphs on seeing a member of another group. Only Ryan Phillippe’s cop and Michael Peña's locksmith are not infected with all consuming hate. They are saddled with the other one-dimensional problem: white-guilt. They are so driven to see the good in people that they do some very stupid things.
I don’t want to sound like I hated Crash. I enjoyed my time while watching the film and would actually recommend it to people. The acting is almost uniformly good. Except for Brendan Fraser, who looked like he was sleepwalking through his part, everyone did more than what they could with their parts. My personal favorites were Matt Dillon and Keith David in his one scene as the police lieutenant. Taken scene by scene the acting and writing make from some great individual scenes. However, once you add all of this together you have an average film that is well worth seeing but is beset with many problems.
I’m usually a fan of sociological films containing characters from multiple backgrounds whose lives intersect at random. Nashville, Grand Canyon, Short Cuts, and Magnolia are some of my favorite films of all-time. These films had an epic quality that does justice to their characters. Crash is nothing more than the racism filled rants in the Spike Lee films expanded out to 105 minutes.
105 minutes is far too short a time for the stories in Crash to be presented. It is barely time to tell a light comedy with four characters but here Paul Haggis had decided to construct a sweeping drama with at least twelve major characters. As he showed in Million Dollar Baby, he is anything but subtle. With so little time to allot to each character, each one must immediately spew out racial epitaphs on seeing a member of another group. Only Ryan Phillippe’s cop and Michael Peña's locksmith are not infected with all consuming hate. They are saddled with the other one-dimensional problem: white-guilt. They are so driven to see the good in people that they do some very stupid things.
I don’t want to sound like I hated Crash. I enjoyed my time while watching the film and would actually recommend it to people. The acting is almost uniformly good. Except for Brendan Fraser, who looked like he was sleepwalking through his part, everyone did more than what they could with their parts. My personal favorites were Matt Dillon and Keith David in his one scene as the police lieutenant. Taken scene by scene the acting and writing make from some great individual scenes. However, once you add all of this together you have an average film that is well worth seeing but is beset with many problems.
Labels: FilmReview
# posted by ChrisR @ 5:00 PM 
