OK, this ain’t naturalism–any “three degrees of separation” ensemble drama set in the vast wastelands of Los Angeles has to be a total fantasy, right? Crash‘s politics are of the knee-jerk variety but the performances are strong, the editing clean and the sentimental moments few and far-between and well earned (absolutely needed given the film’s bleak outlook on humanity). It was worth six bucks, but I don’t think you’d be missing anything if you waited for the DVD. That being said, I was moved by the film. Haggis offers up a gut-punching script which keeps picking at scabs only to reveal deeper wounds, and such polemics make for a viscerally emotional ride. In the end Crash is a B+ movie with a fine cast (in particular, Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe and Matt Dillon) who are guided by a no-nonsense directing style that works. I’d rather America be watching more films like this than those in which Tom Cruise or Nicholas Cage save the world.
I left the film feeling a little too manipulated. That’s not to say I disagree with your larger points: It’s wars and worlds better than Cage and Cruise, and it’s too bad more Americans aren’t interested in seeing films such as this.
There were a couple of times that I felt Haggis took the easy way out. First with the gun and little girl, and second with Sandra Bullock getting a sprained ankle. I’m not giving away much by saying that most people in the film go through a hellish experience and come out of the other side a little changed. Sandra Bullock mostly just sprains an ankle to come to her epiphany.
Dayna brought up something about Ryan Philippe’s character I had not considered but might have been true at some point in the script’s writing – that he’s gay. And that made me think that there was probably a lot more to this film than what we saw. My guess is that Haggis wanted to make a big sprawling Altman-type film, but that it got cut down to give it a reasonable running time. Some characters barely get to do more in this film than watch a main character talk on a cell phone.
We watched some of Soderbergh’s Traffic the other night, and that film is so much better, treading in some of the same territory. Still, Don Cheadle chalks up yet another great performance (I kept thinking I’d see Luis Guzman walk onto screen, but he never did…). I also liked Brendan Fraser’s part, but I always think he is under-rated (Gods and Monsters, The Quiet American) – and the scene with Newton and Matt Dillon did have me squirming uncomfortably in my seat as films of this sort try to do, and often fail. Definitely worth seeing.
No disagreements here, though I do think Bullock, playing against type, earns her moment. It not so much that she sprains her ankle as it is the realization that occurs when she tries to share an important “moment” with her closest friend on the cellphone. The payoff post-ankle sprain worked for me (even if it felt much larger and more compressed than “real” life). I too like Brendan Fraser and feel he is underappreciated. He was so fantastic in Gods and Monsters. Traffic is a better film, though I did find myself more distanced emotionally from the world Soderbergh created than I did in Crash. The possibility that Ryan Phillipe’s character was originally gay is very interesting, though I’m not exactly sure how that piece of information would have played out in the “extended version.”
Watched Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown last night. Similar to Crash only more complex and more sophisticated (emotionally and cinematically). And its concerns are global. With Haneke’s best director nod at Cannes 05 for Cache, it may be that he is the most exciting director working in Europe at the moment. Does anyone know where I can find some of his early films (pre-Funny Games) on DVD?
Just watched Crash for a second time with wife and mother. I’m going out on a limb and say this is, thus far, the best American film released in 2005. DVD commentary doesn’t suggest a definitive three+ hour cut exists. Watching it again with that in mind made me wonder exactly what such a cut would look like. The film is lean and, yes, manipulative, (no less so than The Constant Gardener) but definitely a powerful work of cinema. I hope the film is not neglected as the year comes to an end.
I saw “Crash” this week for the first time. I can’t remember another movie to which I have had such conflicting reactions. On the one hand, the acting was superb almost across the board, with Cheadle out in front, but Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe, Sandra Bullock, Ludacris, and even Thandie Newton (after being in the wonderful “Besieged†with David Thewlis, how is it possible to have done so much crap for so long?) close behind. At times the abrupt shifts in tempo as the camera moves from one set of characters to another achieves an almost Deadwood-like sense of a community bound together as much by its contradictions and conflicts as anything else. To the extent that this is the goal of the movie, I suppose it succeeds.
On the other hand, the plot lines that these actors were forced to work with struck me as hollow and artificial. It felt like some undergraduate sociology class was told to come up role-playing scenes to depict the complexity of racism in America. Lets try white racism, black racism, the liberal who is racist, the racist who is a hero, gender conflict produced by racism, and on and on. Every twist seemed to follow the lesson plan.
I’m not sure the problem was that the movie was manipulative. I don’t really object to being manipulated, and I have always sort of assumed that the power of film as a visual medium makes it a naturally manipulative art form. It wasn’t even that it looked for neat resolution and personal transformation that was problematic. It was just contrived and didactic. Though clearly a much better movie, “Crash†had the feel of “Grand Canyonâ€: packaging racism for liberals. It may be churlish (I need to stop using this word) to complain about a serious movie about contemporary racism, but I thought the actors’ talents were largely wasted on the humorless material. Oh, and the soundtrack was particularly intrusive, swelling at moments of intense emotion as if to signal to the audience that we should pay attention. It didn’t help that near the end you hear a lovely song from someone who sounded a lot like Aimee Mann, but turned out to be Bird York; it was an auditory reminder of “Magnolia†and “Crash†does not fare well in comparison.
I’ve talked with so many students of color who tell me (tell each other) that Crash speaks directly to them and their experiences walking around the blonde streets of the Twin Cities (if I actually lived in LA I might have a different perspective). Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page spent a large portion of his time in front of 3000 attendees of the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity this past June describing how empowering it was to see a film that brings the contentious subject of race up in any fashion. Page aint no liberal white apologist. Blasphemously, I will add that Magnolia (minus a few gen-x esoterica like frogs dropping from the sky and characters suddenly lip-syncing Ammie Mann songs) packages Eugene O’Neil for the anti-realist set (but I say that mostly to amuse Reynolds who has seen the film 15 times). And I liked Grand Canyon even if I do think you are spot on about packaging issues. The fact that racism gets packaged at all for any audience is something to be applauded (as opposed to films that call upon the great Black sage, Morgan Freeman, to smooth the way for some needy white character). Perhaps I will adjust my pronouncement slightly: Crash is the best American movie directed by an American director of 2005, thus far. And yes, I too hated the soundtrack–that opera-lite stuff that keeps creeping up and the sensitive female singer who seemed to make it all ok–a little too Alan Rudolph for my tastes, but still the emotions are big, the characters multi-dimensional, and one feels like they have punched in the gut (push comes to shove, the film is remarkably cynical about human relations even if it does offer up a warm moment or two). It’s nice that a little six million dollar movie could pull in ten times its own weight and still cross racial and ethnic boundaries. It may not be art, but it is a small yet potent cultural phenomenon, and one, on second viewing, that made me angry even while the new age soundtrack continued to gnaw at my brain. And Kanye West is probably right, though Slate makes his case for him so much more vigorously
http://slate.msn.com/id/2125812/
Interesting. I should talk to some students of color and get their opinions. I’m a little surprised there has been such a positive reaction because the film just seems so… white. It is hard to imagine a black director treating racism in the way “Crash” does. Perhaps that is hyper-sensistive Oberlin speaking, and after watching John Singelton’s latest treatment of racism, “Four Brothers,” I’d rather watch “Crash” again.
Still, it is a fine film, and it may even be the best American film by an American director, assuming “Woodsman” is out of contention. But why “Crash” and not “Last Days” which really is stunning in almost every way, a true work of art, and of which Jeff wrote a great review that captured the film better than any I read elsewhere? Is Van Sant Dutch?
OK fair enough. You got me on my own words! Last Days is a far superior piece of filmmaking and is much closer to my own aesthetic ideals than the prosaic Crash (The Woodsman is a 2004 release–at least on paper). I am proved wrong (Reynolds gleefully chuckles in cyberspace)! I now declare to all fifteen readers of this blog that Chris is my new best virtual friend. I will argue that Crash is still one of the most provocative cultural texts to emerge in America during the last nine months and its success (albeit modest but still palpable) is worth talking about. When Nicola was in England a few weeks ago, the film was opening and the conversations surrounding its release were very strong (and positive as I recall but can I trust that my wife got it right? I’ll have to go to The Guardian). And watching it again last night (with my wife, my mother and my dog), I found myself once again absorbed by its sentimental gut-punching politics.
. . . because its a Saturday and I’m waiting for the sun to go down. Writing for The Guardian, Phillip French favorably compares Crash to Magnolia and Short Cuts, though he argues that its economy of style renders it more direct and less bloated. He writes:
“The surface is realistic and the characters neatly sketched, but they are part of a network of fate and destiny that reveals the city and modern life in all its mystery. This is a world where good people can be forced into acting badly, and ostensibly bad people perform acts of kindness and heroism; where the guilty go free and decent men are spurned and punished; where the wise are baffled and the stupid go accidentally to the heart of the matter.”
link
Yeah, but what do the English know about racism?
I haven’t seen Crash yet, but hope to by week’s end (after we get through Lost). Still, a couple quick thoughts:
A.O. Scott today commented on the tendency in contemporary American films to retreat into stories of adolescence or stories of historical figures–both retreats into a past, and/or retreats from a struggle with what currently ails (and alienates, and defines) us. He points out that Crash is terribly frustrating–but he wonders if its “failures” as a film are symptomatic of the broader American culture’s difficulty dealing with issues of race and class. I.e., it isn’t so much that Haggis et al. get it wrong or “package” it too neatly–but that we lack the tools for complex dialogue on matters of race and class.
That claim is intriguing. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled got a rough rap for having a crap ending–for “failing” in the long run to know how to resolve its own complex ironies and passions. And most people seemed to blame Lee, saying he is a sloppy filmmaker, or just unable to wrap up many of his films. But it’s perhaps much more interesting to read Lee in relation to Haggis’ film, and to try out Scott’s thesis for both.
(On the other hand, I’ve come to really appreciate Lee’s conclusion–to see it as a pitch-perfect, if pitch-black, “resolution” which reveals the embeddedness of racism with the deaths or dissolution of every strong–and almost every–black character by film’s end.)
I don’t buy the discussion–here or in “The Guardian”–that tries to read Crash up against Magnolia or Short Cuts, and not just because I really like the latter two films. Instead, the Anderson’s and Altman’s respective films are collossal failures at representing some particularity of our social/cultural condition–they’re both lily white, and despite some very interesting stuff with class and gender in Altman, they both resolutely avoid focusing on “issues” and instead zero in on their particular characters’ mostly personal dilemmas.
On the other hand–and I haven’t seen Haggis’ film yet–Anderson and Altman are deeply interested in ambiguity. From what I gather, Crash isn’t. And that may be symptomatic–or a corollary–to A.O.Scott’s argument, that we are culturally ill-prepared to discuss race (and class?) with any complexity, let alone ambiguity… so our “arty” films and our “issue” films cut neatly into two separate genres.
Then again, I think Charles Burnett — in To Sleep With Anger — or Lee in many films and Sayles (yes, even Sayles) and a few others–Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil are pretty intriguingly complicated and ambiguous about race…
But an interesting conversation. Thanks for starting it, and/or getting it back up.
i haven’t watched “crash” yet–it is on the list. however, i am suspicious of it on the grounds that jeff is a sentimentalist. i would like to point out though that both “magnolia” and “short cuts” are over-rated and annoying.
I am many things–a sentimentalist being one facet of my fragmented self (the fact that Last Days and Crash and Goodbye, Dragon Inn are competing for my best film of the year should clue you in on that). Try not to paint me in broad strokes Mr. Post-Structuralist (he writes with a smile happy to see that Arnab is actually back in the States even if he hasn’t seen a film beyond the edited for all audience fare that passes for airline time killing)
Magnolia couldn’t possibily qualify as overrated, as no one seems to be overrating it. Fill a room with 25 people who’ve seen it and take a poll. I promise you that less than half enjoyed it.
I, for one, admire it a great deal. It has its flaws…well, actually I can’t really think of any…but I’m not sure there’s been a film like it in a very long time. And Mike is right to single out “ambiguity” as Anderson’s primary concern (though I disagree that the film is lily white–there are some singularly ugly and unsettling moments. And nothing is resolved. Its irresolution itself that is given to us at the film’s end).
What distinguishes Magnolia from Altman’s films, and those of others, is that the ambivalence of reality which it is trying to achieve is built into the very design of film. Simultaneity, coincidence, and contradiction are not simply pressing thematic concerns in Magnolia, but crucial sources of narrative form and logic. So what we get in Anderson’s film is not just a story about coincidence and so on; what we get is a glimpse of a new and sometimes frightening way of looking at the world around us. What is often most frightening of all is other people.
I think it’s up there with Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game in terms of discovering new ways to use film to penetrate reality.
How’s that for overrating?
I meant lily-white solely in terms of racial composition. And this from a guy who adores the film, who watches it almost as often as he watches Rushmore and The Big Lebowski and other cherished pleasures. (After Hours gets its own special viewing category.) Like John, I am enraptured by Magnolia. And I have had 25 people in a room (students) watch it, and maybe half liked it, and only a select few fell down to their knees in love like me.
I like Magnolia very much. And formally it is one of the best films of the last decade (its camera work and editing alone make it an instant classic). I just find its “Long Day’s Journey into Night” narrative to be derivative. I find Hard Eight and Punch Drunk Love to offer up many more surprises when it comes to character development and plot.
Chris said, of Crash, that he didn’t mind its manipulations, but rather felt that
“[i]t was just contrived and didactic. Though clearly a much better movie, “Crash†had the feel of “Grand Canyonâ€: packaging racism for liberals. It may be churlish (I need to stop using this word) to complain about a serious movie about contemporary racism, but I thought the actors’ talents were largely wasted on the humorless material. Oh, and the soundtrack was particularly intrusive, swelling at moments of intense emotion as if to signal to the audience that we should pay attention.”
I’m going to go further in my churlishness (I need to use this word more): I thought the film… well, I thought it was plain bad, and a crashing bore to boot.
For instance, much has been made about the rage of these characters, about how that brutal energy–the meaning of which is so precisely pre-packaged in Don Cheadle’s end-of-opening-title voiceover about feelings and crashing into one another–digs into deep-seated hatred. But the dialogue is cheap-seat Mamet, a sentimentalist’s vision of what it means to write angry and nihilistic; it scratches no deeper than a very special episode of “Law and Order.” Key illustrations of the “racism” in everyone aren’t just didactic, aren’t just so stage-managed that I felt like I had the director’s hand up my ass pushing me around the room–they’re jibes about “Shaniqua” and parking cars on lawns and “Osama” and… I’m not saying racists all speak like Mamet; I’m saying if you want to dramatize rage, you need some motherfucking wit to cut to the bone. I didn’t even feel touched, let alone bruised or cut.
(It’s shot like a television show, too–nothing but back-and-forth two shots, and the occasional “composed” beauty shot which signals that shitty soundtrack Chris also complained about.)
Now, yes, it circles ’round race. But I retract my earlier hypothesis that it fails (as AO Scott suggested) because we can’t talk about race with sophistication. I think it fails because it’s poorly written.
I just plain hated this. We see that little Hispanic girl, daughter to the much-maligned locksmith, and Kris turns to me and says she dies before the movie ends. Then he tells his invisible cloak story and Kris says oh, he dies, then she feels guilty ’cause she has his invisible cloak. Then, she doesn’t die–she’s shot with a gun full of blanks, and I think to myself, I prefer both of Kris’ guesses about where the cliches would lead to this preachy piece of sensationalistic claptrap.
And this film is leagues away from Magnolia.
There are few films in league with Magnolia.
tell me, oh fans of anderson and “magnolia”: are you not disturbed at all by his inability to write women who are not screeching, hysterical banshees or witless ciphers?
I’m going to take that “sentimentalist’s vision” line personally!
I don’t think it will sway Arnab, but let me try saying this:
In Anderson’s defense, I wonder if he’s attempting to demonstrate a certain heartlessness in the gaze of others (and the camera). The “hurtful watching” of others, so common in Anderson’s films, pushes all characters, not just women, to hysteria. How, Anderson asks us, do we distinguish bathos and pathos? Specifically, in the case of “Magnolia,” is this a screeching, hysterical banshee? Is this yet another sad moment in the life of a chronic masturbator? Is this the well-deserved comeuppance of an egomaniacal, pathological liar? How could anyone possibly sympathize with this ridiculous drama queen?
I’m not disturbed by “Magnolia” (at least not the way Arnab is). But I understand why some viewers might be disturbed (not just by Anderson’s depiction of women, but also Vidor’s or Griffith’s or Sirk’s and so on). Anderson’s mode is melodrama, and he is using the conventions to force audiences to take responsibility for their habits of viewing. His theme is the human plea for sympathy, and the challenge is to implicate audiences–to punish them, if necessary, for failing to distinguish bathos from pathos. So, naturally, there’s a lot of pathos that can be mistaken for bathos. Anderson wants to “catch” us losing our sympathy, or interest, our ability to feel another’s pain, and then reel us back in.
There’s shame in being, seeing, and sympathizing for, the human figure “bawlin’ away like a twist.” In “Miller’s Crossing,” Tom Reagan mistook bathos for pathos once and he won’t do it again. Anderson assumes that we’re all Tom Reagan, and that, in fact, we’re better off as human beings when we sympathize, even if it means we get taken for a sap from time to time.
yes.
i saw “magnolia” before i saw anything else by anderson. the character didn’t ring true to me in the film, and the screaming, hysterical, tormenting women thing repeated itself in “boogie nights” (another piece of overrated claptrap) and also the adam sandler one (all his sisters). perhaps it is very limited of me to not be able to see past this, but fassbinder, ozon, heck even todd haynes, manage to examine gender through melodrama without selling their women short. so, i don’t think this is some built-in characteristic of the melodramatic mode.
What about Gwinnie in Hard Eight?
Two things, quickly:
1. Anderson’s women: a not dissimilar point has been made about Altman as a misogynist. I can comprehend, cognitively, what Arnab and others mean when they define the female characters in this fashion–as merely shrieking. But I am never detached nor distanced from these women, quite the opposite: I’m swallowed up in their grief and rage, and feel enormous, suprising empathy. And in Punch Drunk, Sandler plays the “female” protagonist of the melodram; his implausible ‘serenity’ is mere gender performance, and when he exposes his grief (to his confounded dentist brother-in-law) or explodes in hysterical rage we see his kinship with Julianne Moore’s characters from the earlier films.
2. I have two friends–Jeff one of them–who admire Crash tremendously. I cannot fathom why. But as with others’ failure to see the pure beating heart of Magnolia, I recognize that the film has its hooks which a different kind of viewer, with eyes attuned to the narrative, could make much more of Crash than me.
And in fact I’ll take “C” as the mirror image of “M”–there is not one significant woman in the film who isn’t hysterical, enraged, or hysterically enraged. And, frankly, the men in the film are pretty much the same. Yet I felt bludgeoned into sympathy, not tested (a la Tom Reagan, in John’s brilliant analogy). For instance, I was never once suprised by my sympathies–unlike the many ‘reveals’ of “M”‘s plot, as discussed earlier/above. I could have mapped (and in fact, feel like I did map) every emotional dynamic of “C” without laying eyes on the damnable thing.
A “melodram” is made up of two melojiggers.
My last post is littered with the refuse of insufficient sleep–a couple typos, some confused syntax. Sorry; hopefully it mostly makes sense.
My other posts are models of clarity and cogency.
mike, this is very generous of you–you seem to have drunk deep from his melodram. but i can’t help wonder why the actual, biological women in the film fall into the category of either nagging harpy (i’ve used “banshee” and “harpy” now, “fury” coming soon) or complete cipher. anderson is a slick film-maker and all his films are spectacular (in the formal sense)–but i find the payoffs to be only banal; he’s like a high-art version of james brooks. but then again, this may only be because i have better taste than you (and bathetic john).
but hey, i liked “magnolia” more than the reviewer at the charlotte observer. he described it as “a three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.” i wonder if they deliver to boulder.
“Admire it tremendously” . . . well, not entirely. Indeed, my reactions to Crash on this page (while always positive) have been less than consistent. While I did bring up the Magnolia reference (or was it The Guardian), I truly do not believe the comparison to be an apt one for this particular film and this particular thread. I will return to my first post and restate my feeling that the film’s schematically manipulative “polemics make for a viscerally emotional ride. In the end Crash is a B+ movie with a fine cast (in particular, Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe and Matt Dillon) who are guided by a no-nonsense directing style that works.” More than that, however, whether Reynolds like it or not (as far as Arnab goes, it appears Crash hasn’t yet premiered on an airline so he probably hasn’t seen it), the film is a potent cultural text that connected with viewers this summer. That makes it worth the effort I think (and that is why, I’m certain, Mike made the commitment to see it through). Grab a random sampling of 100 Americans, show them Crash and Bamboozled, facilitate a few break-out sessions, and compare notes on which film engaged them the most. While this wouldn’t be an exercise in film literacy or analytical thinking, I would argue that mainstream pulp would triumph over indie art (at least as far as opening up a dialogue about social justice is concerned). Graham, has it opened in Germany yet? What’s the buzz if any.
Arnab is more interesting when he’s talking about films he likes. Mike makes more sense when he’s talking about films he doesn’t like. I, of course, am right about “Magnolia.” The end.
The idea of a random sampling of Americans forced to watch Crash and Bamboozled is very interesting–but their responses, and I agree with Jeff’s predictions about the lean toward the former, would say more about how hard it is to talk outside of certain ideological boxes about race, or class, or the other big problems.
Both films are equally comfortable with viewer discomfort–and rely heavily on rage, and rage-filled characters, to make their points. There endeth the similarities. Lee’s film is resolutely concerned with how racism pervades not just our personal interactions but our social institutions. Haggis’ film touches on but too easily individualizes the system–racism is what manifests in people, and it is people who manifestly undo its corrosions. I think Americans, particularly white Americans, want to hear that. And no one knows what to do with Lee’s bilious, often outrageously funny pessimism. I would much rather have the hard conversations with an audience after Lee’s movie than try to engage with the sober liberal guilt or somber aphorisms that might too easily follow Crash.
That said, I absolutely agree that it’s worth seeing through, so that you can enter the conversation. But I’m not as sure that it’s the cultural phenomenon Jeff notes. Maybe. But I doubt it. (I hear a lot more about Wedding Crashers….)
Arnab, have you seen this yet? What do you think?
“crash” is in the netflix queue. it might arrive on tuesday, but that depends on whether netflix decides to finally start sending us the first season of “lost”. in the meantime how do you lot feel about cronenberg’s “crash”?
cold hard and precise . . . a lot like Spider. I’m actually looking forward to The History of Violence because it sounds a tad accessible.
As far as talking about race, one must start somewhere (in the box). And while I grow weary of defending this film, I do think the narrative thread centering on the DA’s office does work to engage the ways “racism pervades not just our personal interactions but our social institutions.” That being said, I hereby renounce all enthusiasm about this film (though I am still curious about Reynolds response to M$B).
Before they showed black/white Crash at the Los Feliz 3 they were playing the (excellent) soundtrack to Cronen-Crash in the theater, which was most likely an error on someone’s part…
I didn’t like Cronenberg’s Crash when I saw it. It has however, become very built up in my mind. A second viewing confirmed it for me. I think I would rate it even higher when I saw it again. I want to see History of Violence this weekend if I can find it. Though Corpse Bride is out and playing bearby also…
nearby, that is… Arnab, can’t we get the edit comments button back? Not only for my typos, but for poorly reasoned posts?
you should be able to edit your own posts (as in non-comments)–not true? i think there’s an updated version of wordpress that came out while i was in india. lemme see if it allows folks to edit their own comments.
okay, watched crash tonight. i can’t say i hated it but i found it incredibly banal. everybody’s flawed, no-one’s innocent blah blah blah….sunhee maintains that the fact that the “good” characters do “bad” things and vice versa shows the film is not being schematic. i think all it shows is that the film is trying too hard to be unpredictable: you know that gun is going to be fired by the cranky iranian guy at the noble hispanic guy from the moment they meet. the twist is that it is loaded with blanks. but what does this bit of “fooled you!” unpredictability actually do? the hispanic man goes in with his family and they hug, the iranian guy starts babbling about angels. these moments have no effect of any kind–which would be interesting except the film seems to intend them to be transfiguring moments.
i was struck, however, by the fact that the only characters who are indicted by someone else in the film are black (and they’re indicted by other black characters): the upperclass director telling ludacris he embarasses both of them; don cheadle’s mother disinheriting him. matt dillon’s racist cop meanwhile pulls a black woman from a burning car and is nice to his ailing father; sandra bullock falls down the stairs and discovers hispanic housekeepers are people too. in a sense you could say the film lectures to its black characters, and tells the white people to just be nicer.
ahh–i don’t know if any of this makes sense. but the film didn’t move me–not even enough to try and sort out its narrative of race.
for a film that apparently tries to discuss difficult issues it doesn’t really make anyone uncomfortable. i agree with mike’s reference to spike lee for contrast. “bamboozled” isn’t flawed because it spirals out of control; its spiralling out of control suggests its refusal to resolve/redeem. and i agree again with mike that this film individualizes the issues it raises–here again letting the audience off the hook. actually, that’s being generous–it never puts the audience on the hook. and for the most part everything comes together in the end. the audience can leave feeling bad about it all but not implicated in any of it.
I would say the Asian characters get the worst of it (no lectures for them; just a back handed slap). The harpy, loud-mouthed shrew in the opening moments of the film is revealed to be the loving wife to an even greater monster–a man who traffics in human chattel. I also buy into your final paragraph Arnab. I completely agree. The film asks us white folk to be nicer and more understanding (and it does so without all of the ego and Brechtian devices of a Spike Lee film), but it doesn’t really ask us to work too hard at it. Mainstream realism is always offering us glimpses of societal faults without necessarily forcing the audience to take responsibility for the institutional practices that generate such conditions. I also have to admit that the film depicts Los Angeles (as it always has been depicted) as this hyperreal netherworld with no legitimate connection to any place I’ve ever lived (and I lived there in the mid-eighties for a couple of years). What else did Sunhee have to say?
http://www.altfg.com/blog/?p=263
Interesting.
Poop jokes . . . that’s the best you can do? Reynolds comically shits on the African American Film Critics? Here’s Ebert with more poop for your digestive pleasures: “Foundas (Reynolds? Arnab?) is too cool for the room. He is so wise, knowing and cynical that he can see through Crash and indulge in self-congratulatory superiority because he didn’t fall for it.”
Ebert’s Defense
jeff, i thought you’d agreed with my take on the film. have you now ascended to some archimedean point outside the discourse?
Wow. Ebert calling out Scott Foundas… I’m not sure that Scott has seen that yet. He’s not in the office today.
I really didn’t buy all the negative reviews of Crash I saw here – I stand by my original feelings: I liked it a lot, but felt too manipulated, and felt the script often took easy ways out. But I liked most all the performances, and thought it was one of the better films I saw this year.
And when one says the “Worst” movie of the year, well – there’s different kinds of worst. There’s Alone in the Dark worst and then there’s Magnolia worst.
So I see Scott’s point: Because I’d have called Magnolia the worst film of the year, despite its ambition and good performances by good actors. Ambitious failures are so much more disappointing than films you don’t expect anything from.
Speaking of which, Michael, have you seen Magnolia yet?
not yet, but the debate intrigues me more and more. unfortunately i am now on the cheapskate netflix plan–one movie at a time, and I have to wait for magnolia until I see the next on the list, Tarnation. Then I can join sides
I need to look up archimedean; not knowing its meaning I fear I am now officially residing outside the discourse. More later.
re archimedes: wikipedia explains. this is also related to poop since it is widely known that archimedes came up with his famous principle of buoyancy after accidentally taking a dump in his bath.
i didn’t think crash was the worst film of the year (i can’t even remember what i watched that was made last year but surely there were worse things) but i am not particularly heartened by the box-office success of its feel-good brand of racial politics. and i’m not sure if i should feel bad because the african-american film critics’ association likes it and endorses it. for one thing, i’ve no idea what else these people like; for another, i’m wary of simple identity politics.
michael, why let not having seen magnolia stop you from having an opinion? isn’t it best to form opinions before being contaminated by experience or facts? seemed to work for you with munich.
certainly Doom and Aliens vs Predator must be in the running for worst film of the year. Star Wars may be the emptiest, most pointless movie of the year.
as for Magnolia–I think it’s a dazzlingly revolutionary melodrama which is nevertheless pretentious and unwatchable.
Worst film of the year: The Chumscrubbers. I cannot even begin to describe how bad this movie is (and what a cast). Most disappointing movies of the year: Star Wars III and War of the Worlds.
Arnab, I’m with you on the African American Film Critics Association . . . just giving Reynolds a little extra shit. Still, the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (approx. 3000 predominantly people of color who are faculty, staff, administrators and students at colleges and universities across America) is so taken with the film that they have turned it into a “Special Event” for their 2006 gathering in Chicago. Click here and scroll down a bit.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Racial drama “Crash,” already shaping up as a major contender for the Oscars, led the films nominated on Tuesday by the nation’s largest civil rights group, the NAACP, for its annual Image Awards.
I attended a showing of Crash, with subsequent discussion, here on campus last evening. My reactions are modified slightly by the event (an enactment, in some ways, of Jeff’s argument about its impact).
There were a number of students and faculty/staff of color who noted how much the movie had affected them, in the most precise sense of “affect”: gut-punched anger, shame, identification. And there was a pronounced affirmation of this film’s representation of the experiences of racism–many noted their own difficulties with the police, and to see a film enact it is in some way empowering–a measure of cultural recognition, particularly as the film’s emotional impact was (perceived as) so audience-wide, so far-reaching.
The organizers–some of the really smart student affairs and residence life folks here–also got the audience to really attend to the metaphor of a “crash” as a way to examine or illuminate certain ways racial tension emerges on our campus. In other words, by emphasizing a) an emotional impact and then closely tying it to b) a particular social community’s engagements, they made of Crash a pretty damned effective tool for self- and social-reflection. People actually thought in hard ways about race and cross-racial communication.
That said, I *still* think it’s a shame that *this* is the film which motivates such conversations, because (in this third viewing) it remains a deeply-flawed, even sometimes regressive vision of race and identity. I won’t rehash the ideas argued above, but two big problems in the film were echoed in our more complex group discussion.
First, the movie is persistently, nauseastingly intent on the individualization of racism and the impacts of race. While I think it’s a lot more empowering that Bill Clinton feels your pain, rather than riding bikes with Lance Armstrong at Crawford, empathy is not the only, nor the best, tool for social, political, economic struggle. And too often it isn’t empathy at all; the “sympathy” people felt for the pain on screen struck me as following a long line of American sentimental melodramatics–from Stowe to Haggis–which make the pain of racism something to be consumed. Gosh, that’s awful what those people go through. And when the film shows whiteness or white racism, its embodiments are not the ambiguities of (say) my internalization of racial dynamics, but the stark easily-categorized moments of mean-ass overt attack or sweet-jesus “human” redemption.
Second, racism is shown to be omnipresent–and I think that is a gutsier move, and the film deserves some credit. There’s no easy escape; everyone and everywhere is afflicted. That said, that attention to omnipresent racism does not lead to systemic understanding; to “solve” racism, an individual does a good deed, or–as often–it’s mere fucking chance, the coincidental synchronicity of blanks in the gun.
(And may I say, again, that the fake-out where the locksmith’s kid is ostensibly shot, but lives anyway, illustrates why I much, much prefer my sleaze worn on the sleeve–this kind of self-righteous child-endangering tease makes me want to punch the writer/director right in the face. I don’t even care that the crude plot manipulations end up with her in danger–I care that the manipulation then as arbitrarily “saves” her, which implies a casual exploitation of the emotional dynamics which irritates the piss out of me.)
And the white reactions–judging only from those who spoke up–seemed to reiterate, if not reify, some of those problems. I’m not sure any of them–or, let’s put myself in line here, too, any of us–felt implicated (and certainly not in ways equivalent to the ‘recognition’ many of the students of color noted in their reactions). In other words, while not set in the South or the distant past (and for Americans, it’s all distant), it was still a movie about those racists and people of color. Lots of thems. Whatever sympathies were aroused by the film were expertly assessed and refined by the discussion leaders, but the film itself seems (still) a signal of a liberal-white status quo, rather than a provocation or challenge.
(Why is it, I wonder, that THIS film gets recognized by the Academy? Manohla Dargis had some good answers in the Times the other day, but I can only reflect back on the more complicated, sophisticated, beautiful films of Spike Lee, persistently passed over, and see the exaltation of the film as a sign of the very problems of institutional racism that the stories neglect.)
Some say the Academy love is all about residents of Los Angeles responding to a film that articulates a way they see the city in which they live (more chatter about LA’s highway culture or motor culture than the racial politics of the film). A Spike Lee joint is always about the other coast, yes?
Arnab’s made a good point. Spike Lee is a Knicks fan, too. As is Woody Allen, who this year received the Academy’s recognition for not making a film in Manhattan.
John are you confusing me with my doppleganger?
Yes you’re right, Arnab. I meant Jeff.
kenneth turan is is upset
Precisely.
Just a quick question: was anyone bothered when Daniel, the hispanic locksmith, didn’t bother to demonstrate to Farhad how his door won’t shut? It didn’t make sense. Yes, yes, there’s a failure of communication, a breakdown due to racial animosity. But surely someone in that situation would just say “all right, come here…see the lock? I fixed it. But the problem is, the door doesn’t shut. See?” (shuts door repeatedly). “You need a new door, sir. Do you understand?”
I may sound like a logic Nazi by insisting that this film lacks a sufficient degree of plausibility (Hitchcock called people who called out his films in this way “the Plausibles”), but really I just want to give an example of how this film is so contrived. Since most of the comments on this post–all of them terrific, I might add–already covered this point well enough, I’ll just stop.
And Arnab, maybe there should be some link between this post and Jeff’s “Cowboy Sex” post (given your recent comment that has the excerpt from Turan’s excellent review).
uhh . . .
AND
Reynolds . . . where was this critique when talking about Munich?
I won’t speak on Reynolds’s behalf, or presume to think I could rise to his defense, but I think that, with Munich, this is not a case of plot manipulation, not an example of a “child-endangering tease.” Maybe Reynolds was irritated by this scene from Munich, but I wasn’t. In part, because I expect from Spielberg at least one scene like this per film–a child in harm’s way. I’m thinking it’s a little closer in spirit to the scene from Saving Private Ryan, where a father hands his daughter over to the Americans for safekeeping. What happens is that she is not safe at all, she is immediately put in harm’s way–and she thinks her father has abandoned her. When she’s finally reunited with her father, she screams at him and slaps him furiously. This is not a tease. The scene works to make us feel the utter chaos of warfare, and how the gallantry of the father’s gesture, instinctual or not, is not only pointless, but reckless (as is the company’s efforts to find Ryan and bring him back to his mother).
In Munich we get a glimpse of a normal household (piano lessons, phone calls interrupting a girl’s plea for her busy father’s attention, etc.). Spielberg may be asking us to wonder how terrorism can reach into, how it can target, such intimate, random, innocuous moments. And retaliation is so blunt and uncontrollable–it can’t be finessed (the “bomb expert” is not an expert at all, the bombs get the best of him, and skill is no guarantee that you won’t bring about an unholy mess no one wants)–that everyone is in harm’s way. It’s luck if you can save your own ass, it’s luxury if you can save an innocent girl.
I’m not sure if I can defend the scene from Crash. But this may be due to a lack of will, or skill, or both.
further, in munich the scene is necessary to delineate the moral greyness into which the group has fallen by the end of the film. the crux of the scene is not whether the child will live, but whether the group will sacrifice her. and it isn’t sentimental finally, either: at the culmination of the scene her loving father is blown up. in crash, on the other hand, the scene has no purpose but to jerk us around.
Nice. Arnab, I completely buy that reading.
Okay–yeah, everyone handled it better (and faster) than me. I’d go further: the film ends with Bana wandering the streets of Brooklyn, seeing his daughter endangered by all around him. The consequences of the earlier threat to the kid are a pervasive (and wrong) fear about children everywhere, all the time. In other words, as I had said earlier about Munich, it employs certain of the thrills of the conventional thriller–but its purpose is to complicate our pleasures. The actual scene breaks away from the sentimentalized ‘recovery’ of the family so typical after child-endangerment; the whole friggin’ movie breaks down and actively challenges the notion that such pleasures (whether of visual or actual revenge) come without strings or consequences or moral implications.
And I suppose the other quote is to call me out on the cultural phenom of Crash, to prove me wrong. So proven. But I want stipulated for the record: come back to me in five years, and let’s see about the film’s staying power. I predict its significance will, like many other Oscar-anointed “important films,” slip precipitously into oblivion or a revised history pretty damn soon.
Oh–and the bombmaker is actually a toymaker, a little irony that gets us back (I think) to John’s point about Spielberg: here’s a guy restlessly and unromantically envisioning the intersections of childhood (and the childlike) with adulthood all his damn career….
I wish Speilberg would push that critique a bit further if you ask me. A.I., Speilberg’s most recent full-bodied paean to the undying–literally–myth of boyhood (though Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds should receive honorary status) was Romanticism writ large (tempered only by the strange hybrid energy of Kubrick’s participation).
As for Crash, I guess I’m humorously wondering if the bells celebrating The Wedding Crashers‘ cultural gravitas are still ringing in your ears? Crash, for all its mid-cult provocations and tidy, if troubling, denouement, still strikes me as a worthy step in the right direction. Wouldn’t it be nice if, in five years, the film’s staying power has been reduced to drivel because another film has come along that captures the American zeitgeist and recuperates many of the arguments which were so intelligently articulated on this blog?
That being said, I think it is sad that the post-Oscar gossip centers on a debate that pits racism and homophobia against each other. Personally, I would have voted for Capote but you’ve got to admit it was a pretty good year for people who like to watch.
I have not seen Crash but that doesn’t stop me…etc. etc.
I will see it as soon as I catch up with the other 45 films on the Netflix cue!
I suspect Crash is chock full of good intentions, the contemporary equivalent of something like Best Years of Our Lives, that lumbering piece of “Quality” hitting on The Big Issues.
but two things strike me: 1.) something seems very wrong with the conceit of different races encountering each other during a day in Los Angeles–what struck me in LA was how radically sealed off everyone was, racially, geographically and otherwise. As a bus rider and adventurer I may have seen more sides of LA than some of its more permanent residents–but I did not see anything like a tapestry of complex encounters between the races. something seems very contrived and false about the idea in the first place.
2.) Foregrounding the issue of race does not strike me as particularly groundbreaking or noteworthy any more; every TV drama has “tackled” the important issue of RACE, one which tragically demonstrates that though we have made progress, much more needs to be done, etc. The “issue” now has a reverential mantle of tragedy around it, timeless and almost nostalgic. I would imagine that Barbershop is a far more profound movie about race, simply for the fact that it is the only thing in my recent memory to poke a hole in the doctrines of racial reverence, thereby allowing Blacks to be something other than “a problem.” The outrage at jokes concerning MLK and Rosa Parks, expressed by self-appointment spokesmen for The Race, indicated that something transgressive and possibly interesting was going on.
The problem with so much “controversial” material about race is the ease with which it accepts the doctrine of racial difference to begin with, a convenient fiction whose purported legitimacy ought to be put to rest. Regretfully I am simply using Crash as the launching ground for my own rant here–but the whole thing reminds me a bit of the student protesters who go on symbolic hunger strikes in order to demand that a department of a certain kind of ethnic studies be founded at a university. The faith in structure is touching but misplaced. I don’t know if the best way to break the hold of Race is to confront its “Seriousness” with such naive tenderness. Yes, I am not immune from feeling gulty about saying it, but, when Maya Angelou reads an uplifting poem at somebody’s inauguration, I feel like doing something bad.
I haven’t read anyone’s opinion, but I’ve got a positive and negative to share, and would love to hear some feedback.
Positive: the theme, per Matt Dillon’s character, of “you don’t know who you really are” (paraphrasing) came through, was moving, and was relevant. I can’t imagine any of the characters in the film would have described themselves as racist until they hit a crisis-point that exposed something ugly and underlying. This speaks to the climate in the U.S., in which many citizens have had diversity awareness training or education of some kind, perhaps enlightening to the individual but falls short of solving issues, 60+ years after the Civil Rights movement, that have yet to be confronted and resolved (i.e. “race” as an ineffective and false social construct, “race” and its relation to education opportunities, job opportunities, economics…I could go on and on, but I have to be in class in 5 minutes!)
Negative: on the same note, I am of the opinion that the scariest and most damaging racism is that which does not emerge from anger, that which is not spoken, but an apathy that emerges from contentment and complacency. I liked the film, but I think it’s more crucial to confront hidden, institutional racism that personal hatred and vendettas. Because, if nothing else, even those who are not “individually” racist are still members of an “institutionally” racists society (U.S.A.)
Just some quick ideas.
Also, in response to Chris’ comment (#8), I felt the depicition of the two young black characters was a somewhat sickening malgamation of what whites perceive blacks to be, and what whites hope blacks will be. Even in the most critical moment the two shared on film together, their dialogue was funny. FUNNY. Why do we love our comedic black entertainers like the Bill Cosbys and the Chris Rocks and the Dave Chapelles? Are they safer, do they carry less weight, because they are funny? Does a white audience want to see a black man have any kind of epiphany or respond to any kind of crisis without demi-humor? I don’t have an answer to that.
Plus, that ending. Bottle-feeding the audience, “sleep well movie-goers”, anyone? Much of the violence was climactically circumvented (in fact, all except Ryan Phillipe’s murder.) What does that mean? Should we see the violence narrowly avoided, or does the film carry more weight if, more realistically, the violence comes to pass in a neverending cycle.
Okay, really rambling, really need to go to class…
Your first post neatly and far more concisely reiterates what our debate on the film kind of circled ’round, Nicci–applause for the film’s focus, intentions, etc.; distaste (or in some, and my, cases outright disgust) for the film’s tendency to play to easier assumptions about how racism works.
I’m kind of interested in your point about the funny. Maybe this is a new topic for its own post, but since you brought it up–
I see and agree with your broad critique of how African-American men are slotted into comic roles — this may offset the other conventional role of the aggressive or violent black man; it may be a reiteration of the long-standing, long-lasting, shucking-and-jiving racist depiction of black men as buffoons. And Chappelle himself has said he walked away from his big hit for fear that he’d been read the wrong way by white audiences. He said something like: “I want to make sure I’m dancing, not shuffling.”
But his comment was itself funny. Funny has an effect. I’m kind of hesitant to cede comedy to the forces of oppression, as if its generic conventions and assumptions are “easier” or less subversive, more easily consumed (and forgotten) by the majority audience. (In fact, I’d tend to say the opposite, and have above–I think the tough comic/satiric punch of Bamboozled is far more corrosive than the easily-digestible slug of melodramatic guilt offered up in Crash.) It might for instance be interesting to try and read how the jokes tossed around by Ludacris and Larenz Tate undercut, play into, complicate other stereotypical images — the fear Bullock has when she sees these guys, for instance.
I’m not sure I’d lump Cosby, Rock, and Chappelle together, either. (Imagine trying to read the whiteness of certain kinds of stand-up via Bob Newhart, Lewis Black, and Lenny Bruce?)
That all said, I think your point about the broader context of reception is a smart one… Maybe these comics do get read in some thin common fashion. Yet, wherever we’re at now in American culture, it’s post-Pryor; I think he smashed or at least mashed up the controlling and comfortable gaze of white audiences looking at “funny” black men.
Then again, I’ve noticed among colleagues and students and friends and family and guys I bother on the bus (on this and other “political” issues) a tendency to dismiss comedy, either just laughing (and not seeing anything more than the relief of the comic) or suspiciously watching those laughers (and not seeing anything more than the casual palliative consumption of the comic).
I never thought to ask before, but is Nicci the same person as Nikki?
Who’s John?
John?