Crash

Crash divides people — maybe more than any other film of my generation.

Detractors call the film undeserving of praise, overrated, manipulative, pretentious, unrealistic, ham-handed, oversimplified, blah blah blah.

Mostly, though, people reject Crash because even though Brokeback Mountain is probably a better film, Crash somehow won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005 instead. They assume some conspiracy exists among homophobic Academy voters. Some just flat deny that Crash won, calling Brokeback Mountain "the real Best Picture of 2005." People are still complaining.

This isn't the first controversial win for Best Picture. How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane in 1941, but look at the AFI Top 100. There's Citizen Kane, safely at #1, and How Green Was My Valley didn't even make the list. The Greatest Show On Earth beat High Noon and The Quiet Man in 1952. Only High Noon made the AFI list. In 1976, Rocky won Best Picture, beating Network, All the President's Men, Bound for Glory, and Taxi Driver.

No one talks about those upsets like they talk about Crash vs. Brokeback Mountain. Tragically, these two completely different films are forever linked, so people can't help but compare and argue. Look at the one-star reviews for Crash on Amazon.com. That's just one site.

My theory? Crash won because the film is set in Los Angeles and holds a funhouse mirror up to race relations in urban society, and Academy voters identify with that more than with latent homosexual sheep herders. (No one ever said this had to be complicated, and I'm not saying they're correct. I'm just theorizing here.)

I view Crash differently than most people, many of whom think the dialogue is forced, and that no one talks to each other in this way. I lived in Chicago for a time. I've visited Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Atlanta, to name a few. Oh yes, people do talk to each other this way — maybe not as overtly, but yes, conversations like these happen every day.

America is an angry place, and people point fingers when they're angry, and sometimes total strangers just deal on each other when they don't get what they want for the umpteenth time.

I also view this film as a kind of "what if?" scenario. What if, for one day, racists said what they thought directly to the targets of their feelings? What if, for one day, even people who considered themselves "open-minded" were forced to confront their own latent racist tendencies?

But even that oversimplifies Crash. Can you conquer racism in one day, or can you just "do a little better each time," as Cleveland Brown says on "Family Guy"? Is progress glacial, tectonic, something else? What is the true nature of progress? Where are we now, and where are we going?

Whereas Brokeback Mountain broke my heart, Crash provoked an equally visceral reaction in me. I went from shocked to angry to horrified to panicked to overjoyed and back again. Detractors say they felt manipulated. All filmmaking is manipulation. All storytelling is manipulation. The trick is hiding the manipulation so the audience isn't taken out of the story.

That's where Crash slips. Watching again, I felt many a twinge, especially toward the end, and I felt a little cheap. Maybe I'm viewing this differently now because I've seen a blue million films in which every character arc intersects in some clever way, and I'm tired of that. But let's not forget that Crash was not the first nor the last film to weave character arcs.

Where Brokeback Mountain told a love story and examined homophobia and intolerance in rural America in the latter half of the 20th century, Crash examined modern-day race relations in urban America. Crash is not a failure, but simply struggles to do too much and ends up not doing enough. But damn if the filmmakers don't try.

Perhaps Crash fell short, not necessarily due to pretension or ham-handedness, but by focusing exclusively on race. Had the film expanded the theme of intolerance to include gender and sexuality, the film may have been much stronger. Racism does not exist in a vacuum; other "isms" inhabit the same world, often in the same people. Of course, then the film would've been three hours long, but that's not a bad thing.

To dismiss Crash outright, or to say the film provokes no discussion or has no worth is wrongheaded. Unfortunately, Crash is not a perfect film and history likely will not be generous. Brokeback Mountain fans will continue to rage, and film snobs will scoff at the mere mention of Crash.

Let them all talk.

I saw Crash in a theater. All around me were African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other Caucasians. My girlfriend at the time cried no fewer than four times, starting with the first scene between Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon. Jeers, shouts, and hisses went up at various racial remarks in the film. The audience felt divided.

But all of us were screaming when the little girl ran out the door. All of us.