Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Crash is the seventy-ninth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. Racism has long been a plague over the United States, one that has often been stoked and perpetuated by film. Some films of this very series, held up as great classics of cinema, reinforce tremendously harmful stereotypes. Screenwriter Paul Haggis, lamented that as overt racism in America had become more taboo, bigotry shifted into more insidious and internal presentations. So he directed Crash, perhaps the bluntest and most unintentionally racist movie ever to win Best Picture.
In post 9/11 Los Angeles a number of people of different races experience and dole out racial hatred as their lives begin to intertwine. Among them are a Black police detective (Don Cheadle,) his Latina partner and girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito) investigating a possible hate crime. A white district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his absolutely vile wife (Sandra Bullock) are carjacked by a pair of Black men (Ludacris and Larenz Tate.) A television director (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Thandiwe Newton) are assaulted by a very racist cop (Matt Dillon.) A Latino locksmith (Michael Peña, innocent) and a Persian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub) face discrimination from people who presume them to be dangerous. None of the names of these people are important because each is little more than a stereotyped construct of a person. The Muslim shopkeeper is angry and conspiratorial, an Asian woman (Kim Lee) is a bad driver that causes the titular crash and the Black characters are almost exclusively criminals, drug addicts or hiding from their Blackness. Written by two white men, Crash supposes that every person of every race is irredeemably racist and simultaneously, they perfectly match the crudest caricature of what their race says they should be. It’s also an insufferable watch. Characters drone on through unbearably didactic monologues about racism in the world. Ludacris’s character is especially loaded with these tirades, but Bullock might be the most obnoxious of the bunch. Haggis also entirely apes the imagery of Magnolia with absolutely none of the artistry or inquisitiveness. Plenty of directors found inspiration in Paul Thomas Anderson’s meandering noir but only one seems to have seen it and said “this would be incredible if everyone was shouting slurs at each other constantly.” To their credit, the filmmaking team behind Crash did seem to mean well with their intent to open the eyes of those who thought America had moved into a post-race mindset. The actual film they put to screens was just so hamfisted that it all backfires from the very first moments. It just strains credulity to watch 2 hours of people of all walks of life talking to each other unceasingly about nothing but race. The only character who reads as believable and breaks through the stereotyped framework is Peña’s locksmith. He faces plenty of discrimination but is far more concerned with taking care of his daughter. A real person in a film that imagines Los Angeles as it is in Grand Theft Auto. It is not difficult to see why Crash won Best Picture, even if it is nearly impossible to defend a couple decades later. It’s an artistic meditation on an important issue and historically that has been catnip at the Oscars. But while Haggis’s film is provocative, it accompanies the shock with almost no insight. 2/10
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