I have a serious issue with how most ensemble films come together. Most of them take an ensemble approach to go in a variety of different directions that never really connect in anything more than the most basic of mechanical manners, making the films feel like they go off in random directions without any real central point (this is the James Gunn approach). That's not what Paul Haggis does in Crash, his Best Picture winning film. Everything is interconnected with the same central ideas of racism, communication, and redemption. However, Haggis leans heavily into the melodrama of everything which, combined with the sheer number of characters going on, makes the final hour or so just outright ridiculous.
It's the story of a roughly twenty-four hour period that primarily views Los Angeles (not America, the milieu is far too specific to LA) through the lens of race, beginning with a car crash involving a black man, Graham (Don Cheadle), a Hispanic woman, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), and a Korean woman, Kim (Alexis Rhee) where racial epithets fly free and clear between Ria and Kim. This should be enough, but Haggis puts an aimless little soliloquy into Graham's mouth about how we crash into each other for contact in our enclosed little lives, and it's just this obvious bit of explanation, right at the beginning of the film, that the obvious main inspiration for the film, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, eluded because it was more confident in trying to convey through dramatics.
This sort of thing really does rely entirely on the strength of the characters, and there are simply too many, especially when Haggis is trying to paint a complex portrait of human experience filtered through race as he's doing here. I genuinely do appreciate the effort at a complex portrait (I thought it was working for a while, perhaps the first half of the film), but it's when he starts having the actual and eponymous crashes occur that the thinness of character betrays the film's overall point. Where the film works best is when it actually gives us time with a character to get to know them beyond caricature. The worst of these is probably the Los Angeles DA played by Brendan Fraser and his wife played by Sandra Bullock, especially her. She has a grand five minutes of screentime, but she goes through this grand change to realize that she's always mad, but it somehow relates to her gripping her purse when passing two black men on the street, and ends up manifesting that her maid is her best friend? It's simply too much in too little time to actually make an effect.
The film's strongest point is probably Michael Pena's character of Daniel, a locksmith who crashes into Farhad (Shaun Toub), a Persian shop owner who starts the film by buying a guy because of a break-in. Farhad isn't a great character himself (he's fine but doesn't really rise above caricature), but Daniel has this very nice moment with his daughter where he gives her an invisible cloak that has protected him from the violence of the world around them. It's a quiet moment of gentle humanity that is probably the best thing in the whole film. And then Daniel has the worst moment in the film as Haggis goes fully ridiculous melodrama when Farhad tracks him down because he blames Daniel for a second break-in. I mean, this is the stuff of parody, especially in terms of its execution.
One of the most tortured pieces of narrative is around a pair of cops, Matt Dillon's John and Ryan Phillipe's Tom. John is a racist who has a father with a chronic disease that leads John to having to call the representative at his HMO who is a black woman, Shaniqua (Loretta Devine). He also stops a car with Cameron (Terrence Howard) and his wife Christine (Thandie Newton) where he molests Christine during a pat down and gets Cameron to act subservient to him while he does it. He then has some great redemption when he rescues Christine the next day (how many people live in LA and how big is it?, this is Home Alone 2 levels of ridiculous coincidence) despite having...not grown? I dunno. It's too short. Tom, on the other hand, also, independently, runs into Cameron (seriously?) and talks him down from having a suicide by cop because...Cameron is having trouble with his black identity as a studio executive?
And then there's the two black men who scared Sandra Bullock, Anthony (Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate). Anthony rambles constantly about the state of the black man in Los Angeles, pining for the days of the intellectual black activist from the 60s, while justifying stealing from white people all while Peter hangs on and just kind of laughs through the whole thing. I suspect that this was Haggis' effort at pointing the finger at some element of the black community for contributing to the overall racial strife, but it's such a messy portrait at the same time. Throw in the fact that there's an accidental hit and run involving a Korean man, Choi Chin (Greg Joung Paik), who ends up married to Kim from the beginning and was...transporting Chinese slaves in his van? This is a mess.
So, I appreciate some of what Haggis is doing. He's doing a lot, and the embrace of complexity around human interactions works decently well for about the first half, and then the melodrama kicks in, revealing all of the major flaws with the thin portraits who are working through what's going on. The majorly heightened events are so far above the angry phone calls of the baker in Short Cuts (which is also about an hour longer), revealing that Haggis's efforts trended much more towards the thinly melodramatic rather than the meatily humanistic. It makes me glad that Clint Eastwood denied him a second draft on Million Dollar Baby.
This isn't The English Patient bad, but it's not really good either. It feels like the serious version of Love Actually that Inarritu would manage much better the following year with Babel.
It's the story of a roughly twenty-four hour period that primarily views Los Angeles (not America, the milieu is far too specific to LA) through the lens of race, beginning with a car crash involving a black man, Graham (Don Cheadle), a Hispanic woman, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), and a Korean woman, Kim (Alexis Rhee) where racial epithets fly free and clear between Ria and Kim. This should be enough, but Haggis puts an aimless little soliloquy into Graham's mouth about how we crash into each other for contact in our enclosed little lives, and it's just this obvious bit of explanation, right at the beginning of the film, that the obvious main inspiration for the film, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, eluded because it was more confident in trying to convey through dramatics.
This sort of thing really does rely entirely on the strength of the characters, and there are simply too many, especially when Haggis is trying to paint a complex portrait of human experience filtered through race as he's doing here. I genuinely do appreciate the effort at a complex portrait (I thought it was working for a while, perhaps the first half of the film), but it's when he starts having the actual and eponymous crashes occur that the thinness of character betrays the film's overall point. Where the film works best is when it actually gives us time with a character to get to know them beyond caricature. The worst of these is probably the Los Angeles DA played by Brendan Fraser and his wife played by Sandra Bullock, especially her. She has a grand five minutes of screentime, but she goes through this grand change to realize that she's always mad, but it somehow relates to her gripping her purse when passing two black men on the street, and ends up manifesting that her maid is her best friend? It's simply too much in too little time to actually make an effect.
The film's strongest point is probably Michael Pena's character of Daniel, a locksmith who crashes into Farhad (Shaun Toub), a Persian shop owner who starts the film by buying a guy because of a break-in. Farhad isn't a great character himself (he's fine but doesn't really rise above caricature), but Daniel has this very nice moment with his daughter where he gives her an invisible cloak that has protected him from the violence of the world around them. It's a quiet moment of gentle humanity that is probably the best thing in the whole film. And then Daniel has the worst moment in the film as Haggis goes fully ridiculous melodrama when Farhad tracks him down because he blames Daniel for a second break-in. I mean, this is the stuff of parody, especially in terms of its execution.
One of the most tortured pieces of narrative is around a pair of cops, Matt Dillon's John and Ryan Phillipe's Tom. John is a racist who has a father with a chronic disease that leads John to having to call the representative at his HMO who is a black woman, Shaniqua (Loretta Devine). He also stops a car with Cameron (Terrence Howard) and his wife Christine (Thandie Newton) where he molests Christine during a pat down and gets Cameron to act subservient to him while he does it. He then has some great redemption when he rescues Christine the next day (how many people live in LA and how big is it?, this is Home Alone 2 levels of ridiculous coincidence) despite having...not grown? I dunno. It's too short. Tom, on the other hand, also, independently, runs into Cameron (seriously?) and talks him down from having a suicide by cop because...Cameron is having trouble with his black identity as a studio executive?
And then there's the two black men who scared Sandra Bullock, Anthony (Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate). Anthony rambles constantly about the state of the black man in Los Angeles, pining for the days of the intellectual black activist from the 60s, while justifying stealing from white people all while Peter hangs on and just kind of laughs through the whole thing. I suspect that this was Haggis' effort at pointing the finger at some element of the black community for contributing to the overall racial strife, but it's such a messy portrait at the same time. Throw in the fact that there's an accidental hit and run involving a Korean man, Choi Chin (Greg Joung Paik), who ends up married to Kim from the beginning and was...transporting Chinese slaves in his van? This is a mess.
So, I appreciate some of what Haggis is doing. He's doing a lot, and the embrace of complexity around human interactions works decently well for about the first half, and then the melodrama kicks in, revealing all of the major flaws with the thin portraits who are working through what's going on. The majorly heightened events are so far above the angry phone calls of the baker in Short Cuts (which is also about an hour longer), revealing that Haggis's efforts trended much more towards the thinly melodramatic rather than the meatily humanistic. It makes me glad that Clint Eastwood denied him a second draft on Million Dollar Baby.
This isn't The English Patient bad, but it's not really good either. It feels like the serious version of Love Actually that Inarritu would manage much better the following year with Babel.