Trash is a Cravesty
or
Why the “Best Picture” of 2005 is Bunk
By Douglas Hickey
April 2006
Warning to the Reader: This review of Paul Haggis’s film Crash contains spoilers (although it’s hard to imagine how you could spoil something that’s already this rotten).
My father likes to refer to the Academy Awards as a self-licking ice cream cone, and for once in his life the old man might be right. After all, this is a soporific annual affair in which a group of disgustingly rich celebrities get together to congratulate themselves on how great they are while parading around in ridiculously expensive and (more often than not) revolting evening gowns in the hopes of landing a glam shot on the cover of next week’s Enquirer. Who actually gets to tote home Oscar gold at the end of the evening is almost always determined by months of aggressive politicking by actors, studios, and distributors. It very rarely has anything at all to do with merit. And yet, even knowing how short-sighted, thick-headed, self-indulgent and…well… stupid the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can be, I was completely dumbstruck when the award for Best Picture this year went to the preachy, obvious, and grossly overrated Crash.
Before I continue, I feel obligated to state out front that Crash is probably not the worst movie ever made. Most of the actors in this picture turn in solid performances, and if I’m totally honest with myself I have to admit that there are one or two scenes in the film that do play out nicely. But any sort of coherent dialogue about race relations that Haggis hopes to provoke with this film is subverted by the screenplay’s shrill and relentless pedantry. Haggis seems to believe that by having his actors yell racial pejoratives at each other, he can do without the tired, superfluous conventions other filmmakers have traditionally relied upon, little extras like story and character. In fact, there is almost no one in Crash who is identifiably human. Instead of people who have understandable motivations and interact with one another in believable ways to create dramatic tension, what Crash gives us are mechanical constructs in which seemingly incompatible drives coexist to show all of us in the audience how complicated racism really is.
If this sounds clever, it is…in the lowest sense of the word, as in the sentence, “Oh, Paul Haggis, aren’t you clever.” When you strip away all of the posturing and pretense (of which there are plenty in this film) there’s nothing left that even slightly resembles genuine complexity. Everything takes place on the surface and involves harlequinesque manipulations and contrivances that wouldn’t be out of place in a junior college creative writing class. Take Matt Dillon’s character, for example. Dillon is a bad cop who gets his kicks from groping women during routine traffic stops and belittling people of color. But later we find out that he takes care of his sick father (How incongruous.), and (Would you believe this?) saves the life of the very same black woman he molested (Oh, the vagaries of fate). Some critics (who have their own television programs) have praised this tripe as evidence of subtle character development or (even more nauseating) redemption. Well, call me right wing, but a sex offender who rescues his ex-victim from a car accident is not a humanitarian, and a slapdash assemblage of a dozen stilted conversations in which big-name actors exchange racial slurs while pontificating about American life is not an important film.
Ignoring the fact that Crash is both alienating and superficial, I think it’s important to consider what Crash is really trying to say to us. The resoundingly hollow and toothless message is that racism is pretty complicated but on the whole is probably a bad thing. The problem with this is that the brand of faux-complexity that Haggis is peddling reduces the actual ambiguities of racism to a formula. There is no chance that you’ll miss this when you watch Crash. Haggis wields his formula with all the grace and subtlety of a pro-wrestler with a 2 x 4, and he clobbers his defenseless viewers with it again and again and again. Let’s take a look: An ostensibly good cop who stands up against racism later murders a black man for no reason other than that he is black. (Racism. Complicated. Bad.). A Persian man whose store is vandalized because he is mistaken for an Arab almost murders a small Latino girl. (Racism. Complicated. Bad). An upstanding black professional woman berates an immigrant for not speaking “American.” (Racism? Check. Complicated? Check. Bad? Yep.). Even the unfortunate members of Haggis’s audience, who are first encouraged to laugh at racial jokes and then shamed for dabbling in racial stereotypes, are reduced to pawns in the director’s master plan. (You too are a complicated, but bad racist.) Stand-up comedian Sarah Silverman came close to identifying the innate hypocrisy at the heart of Crash when she quipped that Crash is “a thought-provoking drama for socially aware Americans or a hilarious comedy for racist Americans.” A more concise but less politic assessment might be that Crash indulges and perpetuates all of the stereotypes that it pretends to oppose.
So why would a bombastic travesty like Crash triumph over four films, each markedly superior to the “Best Picture” winner? I’ve heard all kinds of arguments: it’s because Crash is set in L.A., and Hollywood is irredeemably narcissistic; it’s because Crash made the most substantial bank at the box-office in a year of falling profits; it’s because the Academy didn’t want to completely alienate itself from Peoria by giving the award to a certain gay cowboy picture. My own personal theory is that the Academy members are really just too daft to know any better (Witness the way Jon Stewart’s riffs on the moviemaking industry went whizzing over the heads of audience members). But whatever the reason for Crash’s dubious victory, at least socially aware Americans don’t have to wade through Haggis’s garbage. If you really want to fight the powers that be, then Do the Right Thing.
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