Crash (2004)

I watched Paul Haggis's Crash, and I'm a little bit in shock that this film won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Original Screenplay. Although technically proficient and gamely performed by ace actors, the movie is completely demented. Haggis is so conceptually crude that he makes the blunt and tabloidy Samuel Fuller look like Eric Rohmer by comparison. The extremely schematic, literal, and over-emphatic aesthetic does give Crash a certain fascination. In Haggis's vision, virtually everyone in Los Angeles is a nasty, overt, verbal and physical bigot. They're all id without a trace of protective ego or superego; they're not even worried about holding their jobs.

Once he has established this hell on earth, all Haggis does for the rest of the movie is to push buttons with varying degrees of effectiveness. Sometimes this works -- Matt Dillon and Thandie Newton "sell" their pair of big scenes even though one may cringe at what they are being asked to do. The arc of Terrence Howard's character, although illustrated for us in the most obvious ways, has a certain psychological logic that is one of the most realistic elements in the film, and Howard runs with that. Really, all the actors are fine; they deserved their Screen Actors Guild award for Best Ensemble, especially since the material does not help them a lot.

There is a nice bit of magical realism involving a child's belief in a reassuring story her father tells her, but even here Haggis undercuts himself by making sure that we know that there is a literal explanation for what happens. Paul, we could have figured that out without your camera underlining it for us! This is a writer/director who cannot tolerate a shred of ambiguity; he is a misanthrope with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The old theatrical mantra -- "Tell them what you're going to do; do it; then tell them that you've done it" -- is pushed as far in this film as I have ever seen it pushed, so in that sense, Crash is one of a kind.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, I like the alternative formulation I read once in a Kenneth Tynan or Penelope Gilliat review: "Tell them what you're going to do; do something else; then deny having done it."