DAY 7: CRASH
In all honesty, the best way I can attempt to describe this film is to say that it could also be titled “Racism Actually”. It follows about 8-10 storylines in post-9/11 Los Angeles (depending on how you count) over the course of 36 hours, taking an outside approach to help watchers learn how their lives merged and clashed in a way that eventually led to murder. You get a surprising diversity in situations laid out here, ranging from a District Attorney and his abrasive wife getting carjacked (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock) to a rookie cop struggling with his partner’s discriminatory behavior (Ryan Phillipe and Matt Dillon) to a Buddhist African-American television director dealing with the clash between the discrimination he faces and the beliefs that dictate his response to it (Larenz Tate and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges…yes, the rapper). Stereotypes and stereotype-seeking attitudes are present in every scene of this film, demonstrating in quite a loud fashion how their tendency to group other people interferes with their everyday lives – and why they are so hesitant in their attempts to confront it.
Even with a fine-toothed comb, I really cannot pick out a bad performance that was in this film. Everyone does the job the script asks of them, for better or for worse, and they do deliver anytime a particular scene demands a particularly potent emotion from them. We get angry, we get defensive, and we sure as hell hate being told our subjective worldviews are tainted – or our backgrounds “cookie-cutter” in terms of their racial, sexual, or ethnic elements. So if the actors’ reactions to these emotional events greatly favored subtlety, maybe it would have been more realistic…but it probably would not get the point across as effectively to the audience. Their outer expressions match our inner ones, a fitting mirror to our ideological confusions. In addition, the way this film was edited and shot perfectly fits the tone of the movie, almost as if director Paul Haggis had a painting previously sketched out for the amount of light and darkness he wanted in every new reflection of the City of Angels. To say it consistently helps establish and maintain the proper mood, in terms of highlighting the screenplay's clever twists and turns, is a major, major understatement.
That being said, there are two major problems that really do hinder this film's impact in my eyes – which, like the film’s plotlines, are completely intertwined. The first one involves the length of the film, 112 minutes including the credit crawl. At the very, very minimum, there are at least eight different mini-tales we are being exposed to. That gives us, at most, about 15 minutes with each distinct set of characters – maybe notch it up to about 20-25 if you account for the characters overlapping onscreen. What this means is that you barely have enough time to establish each individual, display their racist tendencies, and briefly give an alternate explanation for why they are that way. Usually it is along the lines of either “painful event with family” or “inner character flaw”, but it does not always make the characters feel complex enough to seem fully…well, human. At the very least, some of them seem two-dimensional, merely distinct in the “here’s racist one, here’s racist two” sort of way. It would not come across this way to me if the characters’ collective nuances were more subtle; but by necessity to the script’s intentions (problem number 2, by the way), the way they are initially presented is very extreme. They scream racial slurs to others’ faces, they openly express skepticism towards the idea of racial coexistence, you get the idea. So when you finally start to see a little more depth to them, you aren’t given enough time to dive too deeply; and thus, the shift in tone towards the end of the film (from characters being unlikeable to sympathetic) feels rushed and unnatural.
So does this feel like a Best Picture Oscar film to me? Well...in terms of execution, not really - even though it is still a very good film. But in the end, it would be cheap for me to say that these flaws are why I did not want to watch this film. Admittedly, I did not want to be confronted by the message this film DOES manage to deliver. In our current technologically-speared world, with communication and exposure to other views at an all-time high, you would expect differences to feel smaller in importance. But they don’t…if anything, as we are increasingly aware of how tiny our individual views are, in comparison with how many ways of thinking exist, it makes us desperate to cling to those we can identify with…
Maybe a personal story could help make my point more understandable, one that involves my freshman year in college back in 2006. Every time a new set of freshmen (and freshwomen) arrives at Union College, every extracurricular organization does what they can to encourage them to join their efforts. Coming from a Catholic upbringing and high school, I was eager to check out the Vatican-heeding collective and what they had to offer. They came across as very friendly and at first, I could identify with them. But in the room, there were several tables covered in sign-ups sheets – for everything from politics to abortion to preparation for Lent later in the year. And all I could think was, “Why does me following Christ as a Catholic need to entail all these man-made views too? I thought faith was the important thing. Is my “Catholic” the same as theirs?” I ended up leaving the info session, and decided that day I could not be a Catholic anymore…and it is an inner conflict I still feel today, and one that made me wonder at times if it might just be easier to live what I was raised on.
But you know something? The turning point was when I was told (by a Hindu, no less) that one key to inner peace is “realizing it is an individual journey”. I did not understand the statement at the time. After a while, as humbling as it is for me, I think I am starting to grasp its meaning, and in turn, what Crash is focused on saying. At a certain point, as a necessary part of maturing, we each are forced to learn that nobody can have the exact same views or background as us, no matter where we come from – and at that point, stereotypes that others use can really hurt, because we are uncertain enough already in our stumbling efforts. But maybe part of finding that peace can come from remembering that everybody goes through that process. We all have inner pains, we all feel like others may have it easier at times, and we all have been tempted to attack the world around us in response to feeling attacked by life. And hey, it may seem easier to use a characteristic like race or ethnicity (for others and maybe even for ourselves) as a shield in those weaker moments, against anything different or unfamiliar. But let’s face it: we just can’t do that anymore, not in today’s age of instanteaneous exposure and informational overload, and trying to do so will just lead to more collisions like the ones that bookend this film.
What makes me grateful for Dr. King and his work is that he made it feel possible that the shields could be put down, that our global society could learn to make common traits our chief focus and our different characteristics only secondary – something to be celebrated in pursuit of a larger worldwide path. I may not be “Catholic” in my journey anymore, but I warmly welcome anyone Catholic, white, black, gay, white, bisexual, trisexual…well, anyone in general to join me. It may not be perfect, but if you welcome me as I am (and as I am becoming) too, maybe a few negative collisions can be averted that way.
Score:
TOMORROW (DAY 8): SHERLOCK HOLMES, 1922 VERSION
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