Crash (2005) Review

A car accident at night. A district attorney’s wife, two carjackers, a locksmith, two police officers, a television director, a shop owner and a detective, whose lives will intersect across thirty-six hours in a city where nobody touches anybody.

The 4 is for a film with genuine craft in individual scenes and a governing structure that converts a subject into a mechanism. Two or three sequences in it are very good and the arrangement they sit inside undoes them.

It also won Best Picture in the year of Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich and Capote, and it is the least defended winner of the last forty years.

The Structure Is a Machine

Every character is introduced holding a position about race, is placed in a situation that tests it, and finishes somewhere different.

The mechanism is uniform and that is the problem. The officer who abuses a Black couple saves a Black man from a burning car. The woman who is frightened of a Latino locksmith is caught by a Black housekeeper. The shop owner who threatens a locksmith’s daughter shoots her and she lives. Each pairing is an inversion and each inversion arrives on schedule.

The locksmith is the one who breaks the pattern by not being in it, and the film seems unaware of that. Every other character is assigned a lesson and he is simply doing his job, which makes him the only person in the picture.

That is a designed object instead of a story. A structure in which every position is reversed is not observing anything, it is administering a set of lessons, and the audience learns the pattern within about forty minutes.

Once the pattern is legible the film has nothing left. Every subsequent introduction is read as a setup, the audience predicts the inversion, and the remaining ninety minutes are confirmation.

Short Cuts and Magnolia are the comparison and both are longer. What those films do that this one does not is let several strands resolve into nothing, which is what keeps the reader from learning the machine.

Two Sequences That Work

The invisible cloak scene is genuinely good and is the one piece of the film everybody remembers for the right reason.

A locksmith gives his young daughter an imaginary cloak that stops bullets. Later she runs into gunfire believing it. The film stages the whole thing without cutting away and the outcome is withheld for several seconds that are very hard to sit through.

The staging also puts the audience behind the wrong information. The film has established what is in the shop owner’s gun, the audience has not been told what he bought, and the withholding is the only honest suspense in the picture.

It works because the setup was not a setup. The cloak scene exists early as a piece of parenting and the film does not signal that it will return, which is the only place in the picture where something pays off without having been telegraphed.

The other sequence is Matt Dillon and Thandiwe Newton in the car fire, and it works for a specific reason. Neither of them says anything about what happened between them earlier, the film declines the speech it has set up, and the scene is two people managing a practical emergency.

Newton has said the traffic stop was extremely difficult to shoot and that Dillon was careful with her throughout, which is the kind of production detail that matters when a scene asks that much of a performer.

The Performances Are Better Than the Film

Matt Dillon was nominated and the performance is the most difficult thing in the picture.

Officer Ryan is a racist, is caring for a father in pain, is competent at his job, and Dillon plays all three without ever suggesting that the third excuses the first. The hospital scene where he pleads for his father is the character’s whole construction in four minutes.

The HMO call is the sharpest version of it. He is on the phone with an administrator who will not help, is racist to her about it, and the film puts an entirely legitimate grievance and an entirely illegitimate response in the same ninety seconds.

Thandiwe Newton has the film’s worst experience and the best two scenes in it. The traffic stop is almost unwatchable and is played without any of the dignity that material usually receives, and the argument in the kitchen afterward is the only place in the film where somebody is angry about the right thing.

Terrence Howard is the other half of that scene and the performance is the more difficult one. He is compliant, is humiliated, and the argument in the kitchen afterward is about what compliance cost, which the film then drops.

Michael Peña’s locksmith is the film’s one character who holds a consistent position throughout and is not corrected. He is a competent man doing his job around people who assume things about him, and the film lets him simply be right.

Don Cheadle has the film’s framing narration and the least rewarding position. Graham is a detective with a missing brother and an institutional compromise to make, and the character is asked to deliver the film’s thesis in the opening voiceover about people needing to crash into each other.

Why It Won

The explanation is documented and has several parts, none of which is mysterious.

It was a Los Angeles film about Los Angeles with a large cast of working local actors, screened aggressively on DVD to a membership based in the city, in a year when several voters said publicly that they had not watched Brokeback Mountain. A film about a voting body’s own city, distributed to their homes, against a film a portion of them declined to see.

It also opened in May 2005 and campaigned for ten months, which was unusual then. A spring release that stays in the conversation until February has been kept there deliberately and expensively.

The other element is the subject’s flattery. Crash tells an audience that prejudice is everywhere, that everybody has it, and that everybody can be surprised out of it, which is a proposition nobody in a room has to resist. Brokeback Mountain tells an audience that two men lost twenty years and nobody gets them back.

That distinction is the most useful thing on this page. A film that tells an audience everybody is a little bit guilty asks nothing of them, and a film that tells them a specific harm was done and not repaired asks a great deal.

Haggis himself said several years later that the film should not have won, which is an unusual thing for a winner to say and is the most honest sentence anybody involved has produced about it.

He has also said he thinks it is a good film and that Brokeback Mountain was better, which is a more precise position than the one usually attributed to him and is worth stating accurately.

The Screenplay Award

This page lists Crash twice, once for Best Picture and once for Best Original Screenplay, and the second entry needs stating precisely.

Haggis won Original Screenplay for this in 2006. He had won it the previous year as well, for Million Dollar Baby, making him the only person to write consecutive Best Picture winners.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind won Original Screenplay in 2005, the year between, which means the page’s framing about the timing is slightly off and the underlying point stands. The screenplay award is the more objectionable of the two, because the structure is the thing being rewarded and the structure is the film’s central fault.

That is the sharpest version of the complaint. Best Picture is a judgment about a film and Original Screenplay is a judgment about exactly the mechanism this review has spent five sections describing.

Should you watch Crash?

Two scenes, and skip the rest. An invisible cloak that pays off without having been telegraphed, a car fire in which neither party gives the speech the film had set up, Matt Dillon doing something genuinely difficult, and a structure that reverses every position on schedule until the audience is forty minutes ahead of it.

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