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Crash
- 2005
Paul Haggis - Director &
Don Cheadle - Producer
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  Most Americans remember the words of more than a century ago, as found on their Statue of Liberty which beckoned - "Give me your tired, your poor...The wretched refuse of your teeming shore....." But fast-forward to the present, and there are those who are also remembering, "Be careful what you ask for: you just might get it." CRASH is a film about America - for Americans (Los Angeles, in particular), and takes an introspective long-stare at where that "wretched refuse" is today. It seems that that which was meant to be the melting pot of cultural diversity has ended up being the refractory cauldron of racial adversity. And there may or may not be a small candle at the end of the winding tunnel.
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CRASH begins with a voice-over which says the mega-opolis that is Los Angeles, instead being a center of human social interaction, has become just the opposite - there is virtually no interaction between humans unless they physically crash into one another. And this, the film amply demonstrates - from the first to the last scene. But it is not, of course, the physical crashes themselves that are the story, but rather the resultant clashes between humans so different in origin and outlook as to make them even more estranged than alien beings from deep space. The result is often tragic, often of deepest black humor (no pun intended).
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In CRASH we watch as an uneasy broth of many classes and races is ostensibly kept from boiling over by a Police Force which declares it is there to "protect and serve", but whose police officers are naught but other, separate tiles in that self-same jumbled mosaic. We find that the line between good/right and bad/wrong gets repeatedly trampled, and more often than not, our actions can have results which are not only unintended, but entirely disruptive to all those around us. And redemption, if it comes at all, enters stage left riding piggy-back on one evil clown or another - itself so perverse as to have you looking over your shoulder - wondering when it will come back to bite you. Don't put off seeing this film - you snooze, you lose - and come Oscar time - expect to hear the buzz.
Enduring Line or Phrase: "You think you know who you are...." |
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