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2006 |
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THE 'BEST PICTURE' NOMINEES |
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CRASH |
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Surprising ensemble drama
one of 2005's most daring
of TheColumnists.com
Probably the least known of the five movies nominated for Best Picture of 2005 is "Crash," an independently made film distributed by Lions Gate. It is also my favorite among the nominees--a daring and innovative film that took me completely by surprise.
It's also the only one of the nominees that I decided to skip when it first came out. I didn't catch up to it until it came out on DVD not long ago. I don't know why I was put off at first, but I guess it really wasn't sold too well and it lasted only a few days when it played theaters in my area.
One reason why it may have been a hard sell for publicists is the nature of the film. It's about 36 hours in the lives of a whole lot of people in contemporary Los Angeles. It doesn't have any one central character and the biggest star in it--Sandra Bullock--is just part of a large ensemble, so it couldn't be promoted as "a Sandra Bullock film."
But this film really grabs you and shakes you. It's endlessly fascinating as we see how racial tensions bubble to the surface as these various people inter-react to each other as they're thrown together, strictly by accident.
As a result, it eventually delivers a very powerful message about the subconscious attitudes we have about each other--and how they eventually may blow up in our faces, deeply affecting our lives.
For instance, there's the nouveau riche black couple who are stopped by a pair of L.A. cops, one of them a racist, the other a rookie who's shocked by the behavior of his more experienced partner. The racist stops their car because he correctly guesses the woman is performing a sex act on the man. He does a body search of the woman, touching her indecently while her husband looks on. The husband knows what can happen if a black man challenges a racist cop, but the wife scorns him for not sticking up for her and calls him unmanly.
The result of that incident is that the couple must face their own attitudes about race The man has succeeded in life by not rocking the boat in the white world. His wife is outraged. She believes their money and social standing have insulated them from this kind of abuse and she won't stand for it. Later in the film, the woman gets in an auto accident and is trapped in her burning car. Imagine her horror when she realizes the only person who can possibly save her life is the racist cop who groped her before.
In another incident, two young black men carjack a white couple's Mercedes. The husband (Brendan Fraser) is mad and reports it to the police, but his wife (Sandra Bullock) goes ballistic and begins to rage at every racial minority person around her, including her Latina housekeeper. Fearing the carjackers will use her house keys to break in, she orders the locks changed, but then loudly protests the fact that a Latino man with "gang tattoos" is the one who comes to install new locks. He will bring back his buddies and burgle their house, she rants, even though the young man can hear everything she says.
Later, we discover the Latino lock man is a hard-working family man who's devoted to his little daughter. But he angers an Iranian merchant whose store has been ransacked by thieves by telling the Iranian that he needs to replace his whole door, not just the lock, if he wants his store to be secure. The same Iranian already has run into a white racist gun shop owner who refuses to sell him a handgun because he thinks the Iranian might be a terrorist. Ultimately, the Iranian gets his hands on a gun. By that time, his rage at the racism he faces sets him off--and he vows to use the gun on the Latino lock man he feels is cheating him.
And so on. There are many more incidents that connect all these people together. They are all quite credible incidents that could--and probably do--happen each day in a big city like Los Angeles. By the end of the film, we understand why it's crucial for us to seek better understanding of each other and to not let our subconscious racial attitudes bubble to the surface.
Had I been paying more attention, I should have figured "Crash" would be a great movie. It's chiefly the work of Paul Haggis, who wrote the original storyline, co-authored the screenplay, directed it and co-produced it. He is nominated for both direction and original screenplay.
Haggis is a brilliant Canadian writer-producer who comes from television. Most of you may remember his popular series CBS series "Due South" about a Canadian Mountie working in Chicago. Fewer will remember his other CBS series, "EZ Streets," one of the most brilliant and artsy crime dramas ever on American television, but an abject ratings failure in 1986-87. Haggis is a great writer who won an Emmy for an episode of ABC's "thirtysomething" and wrote last year's Oscar-winning Best Picture, Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby."
"Crash" is a mighty achievement for its convoluted, but compelling concept and its exciting direction. The performances are uniformly good and Matt Dillon, who plays the racist cop, is extraordinarily good and is nominated in the Supporting Actor category in the Oscars.
Few pictures today reach out to find new storytelling techniques and actually bring us a truly meaningful and timely message about the way we live our lives. "Crash" does this in magnificent style, so rush out and rent the video or DVD before the Oscars are announced. That way, maybe you won't be scratching your head in wonder if it happens to win.
©2006 by Ron Miller. The illustration is from the DVD cover of "Crash," courtesy of Lion's Gate Films. The "Oscar" logo and the phrase "Academy Awards" are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. This column first posted Feb. 13, 2006.
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