| MANN-GNOLIA : Paul Haggis's 'Crash' [5/10] |
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| Saturday, 06 August 2005 | |
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Borrowing its title from 1996's Cronenberg/Ballard still-notorious journey into auto-eroticism, its mosaic-roundelay structure from (among others) Altman's Short Cuts via Anderson's Magnolia, its Los Angeles tech-noir neon-nocturnal look from Michael Mann's Heat and Collateral, and its racism/police subject-matter from (among others) Ron Shelton's under-rated Dark Blue, Haggis's Crash is anything but original. It's also anything but subtle. Haggis's approach to the enormously sensitive, nightmarishly tricky, dauntingly complex subject of contemporary urban American racism may remind older, more literary-minded viewers of Evelyn Waugh comment about Stephen Spender - "to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee". That's perhaps a tad harsh, but while the material calls out for kid gloves, Haggis's choice of hand-covering is closer to the boxing variety - as perhaps befits a film-maker previously best known for writing Clint Eastwood's Best-Picture-winning pugilism-weepie Million Dollar Baby. Crash undeniably packs a punch, but the resulting bruises are more unpleasant than salutary or educational. In retrospect Crash, for all its veneer of seriousness, is really a fairly rickety enterprise. But that's not to say it isn't directed, shot and edited with considerable skill. Performances are committed and engrossing, with especially noteworthy work from Matt Dillon (a racist, white cop); Terrence Howard (an affluent, black TV-producer); Don Cheadle (a conscience-plagued black cop) Michael Pena (a Hipanic former gang-member turned locksmith) and Loretta Devine (a sympathetic black healthcare-worker). Also featuring in the sprawling ensemble are star names such as Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Ryan Philippe; plus reliable character players like Jennifer Esposito, William Fichtner, Nona Gaye and Keith David. It's an impressive array of talent - but Haggis tries to cram so many interlocking storylines into his 112-minute running time that the vast majority are given disappointingly little to do: Devine, Gaye and David are conspicuously (even perhaps insultingly?) short-changed. Haggis also relies far too heavily on extreme coincidence - a Martian would come to the conclusion that Los Angeles is a town of several dozen inhabitants, rather than many millions. This reliance on contrivance does, of course, often come with the urban-intersections genre territory - but when it's achieved with sufficient skill (Ray Lawrence's Australian variant Lantana, for example), the viewer either doesn't mind or doesn't care. With Crash, however, every five minutes you find yourself muttering "oh come on", "come off it," or variations on the theme. And there's a more troubling problem of tone to Haggis's script - his vision of Los Angeles is a relentlessly dour and bleak one, alongside which his attempts at comic relief via a pair of verbose, articulate young car-jackers (played by Larenz Tate and megastar rapper Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges), are on the whole ill-advised. It's no surprise to find that Haggis - unlike, say, Magnolia's Paul Thomas Anderson or Los Angeles Plays Itself's Thom Andersen - isn't a native Angeleno, but hails from far-off London, Ontario. He doesn't bring the kind of fascinated outsider's eye of, say, Altman (from Kansas City), Point Blank's John Boorman (London) or Michael Mann (Chicago). Instead he seems to only see the bad and negative sides of the city, the resulting film seeming to say more about his own unfortunate experiences than contribute anything new or interesting to the debate about Los Angeles and its many problems. Crash fixates on racism to the exclusion of all else, and while it's always heartening to see this subject being tackled by Hollywood, albeit via a relatively low-budget 'indie' production, it's all the more unfortunate that the results feel so forced, so monotonous and so preachy. And it's a bit rich that such a sermon should come from a film-maker who, faced with casting the role of an Iranian woman, reckoned it was OK to use Star Trek : The Next Generation star Marina Sirtis, who's only one of the world's most prominent actresses of Greek extraction. Says Sirtis: "Because it's about racism and race relations in Los Angeles, he wanted to cast the real ethnicities in the parts. I play an Iranian; they couldn't find an Iranian they liked, I suppose." Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they didn't care. Neil Young 11th August 2005 CRASH : [5/10] : USA 2005 : Paul HAGGIS : 111 mins seen at Odeon Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 5th August 2005 - press show |
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