Crash

I’m not sure that I ever would have forced myself to watch this picture if it had not been for a long profile article about Paul Haggis in The New Yorker. Haggis is a filmmaker and former Scientologist, and he left the “church” over a flap to do with one of their spokesmen making a statement that made it seem as though the “church” supported California’s discriminatory and illegal anti-gay law known at Proposition 8. Standing up for gay people and renouncing churches (even goofy fake “churches” like Scientology) are both good things. This would be a much better world to live in if both of those things happened a lot more often. I gained a tremendous amount of respect for Haggis after reading that article, and that respect was what finally made me break down and jump Crash to the top of my Netflix queue.

It remains to be seen, though, whether or not I can write objectively about the film. I was deeply disappointed in the cowardly voting of the members of the Academy when they gave the 2005 Best Picutre Oscar to Crash instead of Brokeback Mountain; and though it is not the fault of either the film or Haggis that the majority of the voting members of the Academy are frightened homophobes, I bore the film an irrational grudge anyway. Eventually, though, I came to the film in my own way, propelled by a newfound respect for its writer-director. I enjoyed much of the film (particularly Terrence Howard’s role), but not all of it; and now that I have seen it, I can unequivocally state that Brokeback Mountain is, without question and beyond any shadow of a doubt, vastly superior to Crash.

The film probes the inner workings of human nature, examining the ways in whch a varied group of people react to instances of overt and covert racism (as well as corruption and abuse of power). It does this against the backdrop of Christmas in Los Angeles. The lives of many of the characters intersect at various points throughout the film, an affectation meant to illustrate the point that even in a bustling, populous city like Los Angeles, it’s a small world after all. It’s not a documentary, or even a docudrama, so suspension of disbelief is required; but despite being a narrative film, the events that take place occur in the world of the real—which means that what takes place, while unlikely, is technically possible. This requires a different brand of suspension of disbelief than if one were watching, say, Harry Potter. When the narrative consists of wizards and magic wands, suspending one’s disbelief is akin to turning a light switch on or off.

The suspension of disbelief that comes with a narrative film set in the world of the real also comes with an asterisk. There is an implied bargain between filmmaker and audience: The audience will accept that this is a work of fiction, provided that the filmmaker keeps it real. When the sense of realism begins to shift toward idealism, then didacticism comes into play. The terms of the bargain change. Haggis manages these themes on the thin end of the wedge here. Every major character in the film is first examined either as racist (or corrupt or abusive, but mostly racist) or not, and is then shown later in the film from the reverse angle; and while this is reasonably compelling from a dramatic standpoint, it falls short of the profundity for which Haggis is clearly striving. It’s almost as though Haggis wanted to see what the Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder hit “Ebony and Ivory” would have sounded like if Spike Lee had written it for Tupac to record.

Is there, in fact, good and bad in everyone? Of course there is. Do people react to those forces in different ways, sometimes randomly? Of course they do. But there is random and then there is random. As Hannibal Lecter is quoted in The Silence of the Lambs, a series of supposedly random occurrences can also be read as “desperately random, like the elaboration of a bad liar.” And while that is not the same as me calling Paul Haggis a bad storyteller, I will grant you that the two just might be kissing cousins.

But it’s also possible that there is something else at play here. I think it’s also possible that Haggis might be using the religious backdrop of Christmas in order to subvert his main theme with a much more interesting subtext. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that each of the characters is destined to suffer through something bad happening to them before their better self is revealed; and those bad things happen to just about every character in the film, both major and minor—or, the Jews wander in the desert for forty years before getting to the promised land. But for all of that, only one character seems to rage against the seemingly pointless series of unpleasant events. That character takes it upon himself to stand up to the unfair treatment, staring down death and refusing to give up his dignity or his rights at the point of a gun.

Maybe there is no promised land. Maybe there is only the good luck and bad luck that we achieve on our own or bring upon ourselves. The film doesn’t answer those questions, and it does not attempt to. The whole point is to provoke thought, and this it does quite well. The problem is that Haggis directs with a heavy hand. He seems to understand that he is working with very difficult material that is constantly on the verge of slipping from his control; but instead of trimming the material to a manageable amount, it is as though he is demanding to be allowed to say everything there is to be said about the themes he has chosen to treat. And yet chaos is integral to his themes, too. So we come back to the elaboration of a bad liar.

These characters run into each other too much. Haggis clearly means to show a cross-section of Los Angeles, but he almost winds up creating a grittier version of Stars Hollow. It’s very thought-provoking and would probably reward multiple viewings much more than would be expected for a film that relies so heavily on shock value, but Haggis is trying to do far too much with the material. The intention and effort are both admirable, and the film is very good; but ultimately it falls short of the greatness to which it clearly aspires.