Film Review: Crash

This review contains spoilers in the second and third paragraphs. You are advised not to read them if you have not yet watched the film. (The rest of the review is spoiler free)

The biggest problem for us looking at Jesus’ parables today is that they are so familiar. When Jesus told them originally many of them had twists which gave them the stories a punch, carrying the story’s meaning beyond intellectual assent to something more emotionally charged. Their challenge lay in the way they exposed certain prejudices and exposed them for what they were. Paul Haggis’ first major film Crash (not the David Cronenberg film) is a film about prejudice, and whilst Jesus never used complex individual but interweaving story-lines in his parables he certainly addressed the issue.

Take, for example, the story of the Good Samaritan. Many of us learnt that story before we could even say “prejudice”, and so its punch is lost on us by the time we get to the point we most need it. The sting in the tail of the original story was only partly that the Samaritan was the least likely of the three to help the man. What was most powerful about it was that Jesus was exposing the fact that many of those present hated Samaritans. When he said love your neighbour as yourself, and they piously asked who their neighbour was, he exposed the way in which they hated their national neighbours. Even at the end of the parable, when Jesus sends their question back to them, they cannot bring themselves to say the man’s neighbour was the Samaritan. Instead they merely say the man’s neighbour was “the one who helped him”.

For years I’ve heard that story interpreted, explained and expanded upon, but I’ve never had it sneak up on me unawares, and catch me the way it caught Jesus’ original audience. Surprisingly this is one of the few places that the issue of race isn’t shoved in our faces. The unlikely hero had thus far been portrayed in the worst of all lights, even as he explains how hard his father sought to go against the racial prejudices of his age. We know so little about the hatred between Jews and Samaritan that we never even consider how the Jews may have been wronged by them, what had caused that hatred. For the first time we catch a glimpse of what it must have been like for the man to be saved by a bitter enemy.

There are so many stories here that in the end you are amazed at the size and complexity of the web of relationships that Haggis spins. There are stories relating every which way, encompassing people from a vast number of races. Most films will settle merely examining black–white racial relationships, or perhaps Arab-Jew. Here we have racism between, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and Persians working in every direction. Amongst the many questions it raises is this: Just how do you sit down to write something as complicated as this?

The film has so many other strengths as well. It would have been easy to get lost in such a spaghetti junction of story lines, but the editing is disciplined enough to help us through whilst also being creative enough to surprise us. In one scene we see a bad cop reconsidering his position as he drives along. There’s a cut to a black hitchhiker, and then back to the driving cop, and then to a scene of a car pulling over to pick the hitchhiker up. Only it’s not the cop we expect. Similarly clever editing occurs in number of places. One scene ends being dominated by the colour red, only for the cut to the next scene to come in on a yellow coat. The cut between such vivid and symbolic colours evokes the diversity of skin colours that the film has at its core.

There are also some great performances from a mix of actors some mega-stars (such as Sandra Bullock), some who are less known but greatly admired (Thandie Newton) and a number of relative newcomers. Bullock has a great scene where she realises how shallow and meaningless the life she has surrounded herself with actually is. Whilst in an earlier scene she tries a little too hard to play against type, playing the loveable star as the wife of the district attorney who behind the scenes is a seething racist is a bold move. The American dream is laid bare as the ultimate girl-next-door-come-good becomes the heart of the problem.

Unfortunately, the film is both in some ways too short, whilst simultaneously also being too long. It’s too short because we long to see more of the stories that are going on here. Many of them could have spun into a film all on their own. But it’s also too long because we begin to realise that there’s not as much substance here as we would have liked. Frequently a character plays like a particular stereotype, only for that to be turned on his head for us to discover that they aren’t really like that. The first few times it is quite effective, and even faintly amusing. Sadly, it becomes a bit of a one trick show, and we eventually begin to spot the twists ahead of time. The irony becomes wearying; the upturned clichés become a cliché themselves, and it leaves you feeling cheated. Cynicism is far too easy, and it’s beginning to wear a little thin in general. And a film in which every character makes racist comments of acts in a racist manner has despairing low view of humanity. Ultimately it all feels a little too smug and self satisfied as if it alone rises above the mire of humanity.

The problem seems to be that Haggis has no answers to the problems he exposes, nor much of a source. Lacking a way forward he just lifts more and more stones to see what crawls out from under them. Of course there are no easy answers, but it seems to me that most of the racism the film depicts is a by-product of hate. Many of the characters do not operate out of racist motives in general, but when anger is stirred within them it’s just the easiest, and most offensive target to lash out at. The problem is that at the moment we face a vicious cycle where racism is becoming a more and more of a dirty word, so that even such fundamentally prejudicial organisations as the BNP deny that they are “racist”. As a result racist language gains more and more potency. Thus when people want to express hate it’s an far too easy to use race. Racism is certainly a huge problem, which we are thankfully beginning to face up to. But no-one seems to want to do much about hate, or about the fact that our responsibility to destroy racism starts with destroying it in ourselves, which has to begin by admitting that yes, prejudice is present in our own attitudes.

The film, perhaps unwittingly, gives a hint towards the solution. There’s much use of plastic religious imagery through the film, which appears to be decrying plastic Christianity, and fake religiosity. Even the climatic moment in Magnolia is referenced but using snow instead of falling frogs to strip it of it’s religious significance. The film seems to have made up it’s mind that religion has nothing to offer. However, the final shot is taken from above – known in the trade as a God shot, and used frequently to refer to a watching deity. We are left to ponder what God makes of the web of racist relationships we have just watched unfold.

Personally, I cannot help but make the link in my mind to a similar shot of the crucifixion in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and think of the solution Jesus brought at that point to hate by breaking down the dividing wall of hostility. It’s a fragile ray of hope, but if we can bring our sins and hatred before the cross, and take away more of the love we see displayed there, then there is a way to breakout of the destructive cycle of hatred and racism that Crash so eloquently presents.