Read

Crash (2005) is a “love it or hate it” type of film. It was a serious commercial success, garnered lots of award nominations and plenty of wins - including the Academy Award for Best Picture the year of its release - and was generally reviewed well by critics. It had a great cast and attempted to get across a powerful message. The film has since become a teaching tool in classrooms and universities for discussions of race, urbanism, and sociology. Roger Ebert chose it as his favorite film of 2005.

Yet the internet, message boards and discussion channels are full of hate for the film. Just check No Film School. Or Reddit. Or The Awl. Or True/Slant. You get the picture. There’s more than enough anti-Crash writeups out there.

Not a lot of people have any issue with Crash from a filmmaking perspective. The cinematography, lighting and sound are all fine. Even the acting, especially for such a large cast, is good. The cast is so huge, most of the actors don’t get enough screen time to give a lot of depth to their role. And that fact segues into the most popular issue with the film.

LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas took it upon himself to write an article directly to Roger Ebert, in response to his overwhelmingly positive critique of the film.

“The characters in Crash don’t feel like three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings so much as calculated “types” plugged by Haggis into a schematic thesis about how we are all, in the course of any given day, the perpetrators and the victims of some racial prejudice. (Nobody in Haggis’ universe is allowed to be merely one or the other.) They have no inner lives. They fail to exist independently of whatever stereotype they’re on hand to embody and/or debunk. Erudite carjackers? A man who can’t remember his own girlfriend’s ethnicity? You may see such things as “parables,” but I call it sloppy, sanctimonious screenwriting of the kind that, as one colleague recently suggested, should be studied in film classes as a prime example of what not to do.”

This is, by and large, the greatest point of contention with Crash. Granted, not everyone feels this way, but plenty of audiences view it as a movie where the characters exist only to do something racist, and to showcase what manner of racist ideals a particular ethnic group holds about another. Too much of the film follows repetitions of this platform:

1. A character says something that could be interpreted as mildly racist.
2. The other character says “Hey, you’re being a racist!”
3. Some kind of contrived follow-up happens where the “racist” person does something good and non-racist.

It’s heavy handed, force-feeding the viewer examples of racism that are always interpreted in the most offensive way possible. It’s trying to advertise that every person alive has racist attitudes towards some other group, and that’s fine. Broadway’s Avenue Q taught us “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” but Crash conveys this message without capturing the subtlety of the average person’s racism. Instead it paints regular people with the potent racist brush of American History X (1998), a film in which everyone was a skinhead Neo-Nazi. That’s not how everyday people manage their prejudices, and most everyone in Crash fails to be a relatable human being.

On another level, there’s a common dislike of Crash due to the fact it won Best Picture in a season where Brokeback Mountain (2005), Capote (2005) and Good Night and Good Luck (2005) were among the other contenders. As with any award, it’s a matter of opinion which of those films is the strongest, but Brokeback Mountain was the “favorite” to take the prize that year.