Review: Crash

This seems to be the season of political films. In the past few months I’ve seen Brokeback Mountain (political in a personal way), Munich, The Constant Gardener, Hidden (Caché) and Syriana. Good Night, and Good Luck is also playing now, but I haven’t seen that. And then, of course, there’s Crash, the unlikely Oscar winner for Best Picture over Brokeback.

In a previous post, I wrote that I was so disgusted by the Oscars that I had no desire to see Crash. Then yesterday I walked into the video store and there it was, sitting on the shelf. I couldn’t resist seeing what all the fuss was about. My verdict? Let’s just say I was blown away by Crash – and how bad it sucked.

Now, I tend to exaggerate on this blog sometimes. Ahem. But I can say in all honesty that Crash is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It insulted my intelligence as a human and as a writer. Within the first five minutes, my jaw dropped at how stunningly bad this movie is. Under normal circumstances I would have turned it off, but given that this is Hollywood’s best picture of 2005, I had to see it through to the end. I’ll never get those two hours back, unfortunately.

When this movie was released last summer, it got a lot of bad reviews, including in leading papers like The Boston Globe and The New York Times. I read these reviews after I saw the film and I was relieved that others also felt that there are no characters in Crash, but rather stereotypes (many of them racist, ironically) that go around making speeches about racism, intolerance and bigotry. Virtually every scene is contrived and manipulative and contains a big MESSAGE. The movie plays on people’s emotions in the crassest way imaginable. If you remove the sex, violence and swearing, Crash could be a Lifetime movie-of-the-week. It’s that preachy. It’s that hackneyed. It’s that bad.

This movie is insulting because it assumes that everyone in the audience has the mentality of a Nazi skinhead. Golly gee, before I saw Crash, I thought racism was just swell! I've been taught a valuable lesson! Thanks, Hollywood! I am a great admirer of political films and books. We are surrounded by apathy and navel-gazing and those who want to “say something” with their art face an uphill battle. I respect that. I am writing a novel with a political subtext and it’s extremely difficult to get it right. Crash is a textbook case of what not to do.

It’s hard to understand how so many people were duped into thinking this is an important film. The NYT reviewer wrote that the fact that Crash’s manipulations and speeches pass for “insights” says a lot about the “state of the American civic conversation.” He goes on to write: “So much feeling, so much skill, so much seriousness, such an urgent moral agenda - all of this must surely answer our collective hunger for a good movie, or even a great one, about race and class in a modern American city. Not even close.”

This brings me to the issue of the Oscars. The vaunted Academy is a body that thinks Reese Witherspoon is a great actress, so obviously, they are not to be taken seriously. Still, it is shocking that Brokeback Mountain and Munich, two of the best movies I have ever seen, movies full of artistry and craft and skill, were passed over in favor of Crash. This is an insult to all of the serious filmmakers at work today. It’s really just a disgrace.