Crash (7/10)

I am torn. Here is a truly spectacular film that fails miserably in what it tries to do. Roger Ebert is fond of saying that movie reviews are "not about what the film is about, but about how the film is about what it is about". I don't completely subscribe to that notion (certainly what a film is trying to say will have to factor into how much I like it). And Crash fails the former and succeeds in the latter.

It is beautiful filmmaking, without doubt. The scenes are tense, wonderfully edited and accompanied by the most heart-breaking music. It is an impressive debut from directors Haggis and Moresco, and they do everything right here. There is especially a scene involving a little girl and a gun that you start to expect from the beginning of the film, but turn out to not be what you expected at all. It's breathtaking.

But the film mainly serves to tackle the problem of racism in the LA area, and as such, it is a miserable failure. Whenever dialogue touches upon racism, the film oozes with an inappropriate sense of self-pride. Every turn, when a character speaks a (rather forced and unconvincing) racist slang, the film turns to us and gleefully says, "see? see? Can you believe these people are saying the darnedest things?" As such, these scenes turn into a parade of "racist just to be racist", and "shocking just to be shocking" scenes.

Not to say the film doesn't have any valuable insights into the racial dynamics of the LA area. It does an adequate job of portraying the power struggle between the whites and the blacks. But the other ethnicities get short-changed. The hispanics have no depth of culture except they are stereotypically against stereotype. And the middle-eastern man (forgot the nationality) hardly dredges up any sense of sympathy. And wouldn't you know it, the Asians are completely screwed over once again, with fewer than then lines of dialogue, some of which are used to portray Asians women as stereotypically argumentative, unreasonable jerks, and others are used to portray Asians as stereotypically greedy and unethical. If Asians can't even get their fair share in a movie about racism in LA (where Asians make up a large portion of the population), then we truly have no hope in the near future.

And so I'm very impressed by the filmmaking, but dismissive of what the film is trying to do. What the film is about is unfair, childish and (ironically) simply stereotypical, but the film is beautiful going about it.