Fabmacca
08-Feb-06, 05:08pm
It's taken a while but I finally got around to seeing this awesome movie again. Lamb.... pour vous
Crash (2004) Directed by Paul Haggis. Written by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco.
Crash is a very cool film ostensibly about racism, but it's equally about people, and life in general.
Its aim is simply to show the insidiousness of racism (or evilness) to other people and how it can infect people who in almost all other facets of their lives are fairly decent, if a little blind. Through a series of remarkable coincidences for a very compact number of peoples' interactions with each other it shows the best and worst of humanity, and showcases the fact that ordinary people are capable of some remarkable cruelty and some remarkable fortune.
It's a really good idea: follow a group of people who are all protagonists in their own stories, but whose actions make them the antagonists of other people. It's about people whose view of the world lacks the scope of the wider consequences of their actions and is limited only to their understanding of how it relates to them. In other words, it's about how we ourselves live our lives as the main character in our own stories, and how that intersects with other peoples lives in ways we probably don't realise.
An example. I might have had the most horrible day, am running late as a result of other people's actions, I've had a whole sequence of red lights on the way to my destination, and I decide to run an amber light and cut in front of a car driving more slowly that is halfway across the road. For an instant, I become the greatest evil in the universe for another person. It doesn't matter that I'm going to, say, console a depressed friend or buying pet food for my housemates' puppy. That person I just cut off might react in a way that passes on evil down a chain, and I might feel guilty and give some money to a charity to atone for my alleged transgression, which might be embezzled by a guy. You just don't know.
None of this happens in the movie, but things like that do. Good people are shown in the worst light, and bad people are shown to be capable of isolated moments of goodness as well. A couple of people (one Latino, one white guy and one black woman (woo! Balance!)) are pretty much All Good, which is a little annoying but does provide some kind of anchor that might well be necessary for the film to work as it does. Some good people suffer, some bad people get very lucky; some people live to learn from their mistakes, others suffer for the mistakes of others. Some good people (though not many) survive without even so much as a scratch.
It's a complicated life we live in, and depending on your mood this film could make you very depressed. Luckily I was fortified with a good meal and a comfortable chair and chocolate ice cream, so I was fine.
I think the movie succeeds brilliantly. Without being excessively unfair to any character (although it is in places unfair) it shows life in all its disastrous, occasionally random, frequently unpredictable and occasionally stunningly fortunate glory.
Its aim is to showcase racism and it does that. The set-ups to a couple of the scenes are fantastic and in any other movie would appear contrived almost beyond belief, but here they are so ingrained into the theme that they don't appear manufactured, they're basically required.
It's a great movie. It has trouble ending because it has so many characters' arcs to resolve (or at least bring to some sort of resolution), which becomes obvious after the sixth or seventh false ending. And in one part it over-labours something that could best have been left subtle. But that's about all I could complain about.
It was clever, it was enjoyable, and it had depth. 8.5 out of 10.
Crash (2004) Directed by Paul Haggis. Written by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco.
Crash is a very cool film ostensibly about racism, but it's equally about people, and life in general.
Its aim is simply to show the insidiousness of racism (or evilness) to other people and how it can infect people who in almost all other facets of their lives are fairly decent, if a little blind. Through a series of remarkable coincidences for a very compact number of peoples' interactions with each other it shows the best and worst of humanity, and showcases the fact that ordinary people are capable of some remarkable cruelty and some remarkable fortune.
It's a really good idea: follow a group of people who are all protagonists in their own stories, but whose actions make them the antagonists of other people. It's about people whose view of the world lacks the scope of the wider consequences of their actions and is limited only to their understanding of how it relates to them. In other words, it's about how we ourselves live our lives as the main character in our own stories, and how that intersects with other peoples lives in ways we probably don't realise.
An example. I might have had the most horrible day, am running late as a result of other people's actions, I've had a whole sequence of red lights on the way to my destination, and I decide to run an amber light and cut in front of a car driving more slowly that is halfway across the road. For an instant, I become the greatest evil in the universe for another person. It doesn't matter that I'm going to, say, console a depressed friend or buying pet food for my housemates' puppy. That person I just cut off might react in a way that passes on evil down a chain, and I might feel guilty and give some money to a charity to atone for my alleged transgression, which might be embezzled by a guy. You just don't know.
None of this happens in the movie, but things like that do. Good people are shown in the worst light, and bad people are shown to be capable of isolated moments of goodness as well. A couple of people (one Latino, one white guy and one black woman (woo! Balance!)) are pretty much All Good, which is a little annoying but does provide some kind of anchor that might well be necessary for the film to work as it does. Some good people suffer, some bad people get very lucky; some people live to learn from their mistakes, others suffer for the mistakes of others. Some good people (though not many) survive without even so much as a scratch.
It's a complicated life we live in, and depending on your mood this film could make you very depressed. Luckily I was fortified with a good meal and a comfortable chair and chocolate ice cream, so I was fine.
I think the movie succeeds brilliantly. Without being excessively unfair to any character (although it is in places unfair) it shows life in all its disastrous, occasionally random, frequently unpredictable and occasionally stunningly fortunate glory.
Its aim is to showcase racism and it does that. The set-ups to a couple of the scenes are fantastic and in any other movie would appear contrived almost beyond belief, but here they are so ingrained into the theme that they don't appear manufactured, they're basically required.
It's a great movie. It has trouble ending because it has so many characters' arcs to resolve (or at least bring to some sort of resolution), which becomes obvious after the sixth or seventh false ending. And in one part it over-labours something that could best have been left subtle. But that's about all I could complain about.
It was clever, it was enjoyable, and it had depth. 8.5 out of 10.