"A film teeming with solemn recognition of the nasty complexities of living in a multi-cultural society, and much of what remains unspoken racially in America being neatly shoved under a complacent rug"
Crash
"Set logically in LA, the road rage capital of the world, Crash weighs in on the explosive mix of cars and race that notoriously tends to play out there. Paul Haggis, who just struck it rich with his screenplay for Million Dollar Baby moves on from baby's skid row to for his directing debut in a movie that weaves in and out of the harrowing and yet often deeply touching high anxiety network along the California race and class divide....Haggis, unlike the typical filmmaker who sees no value in connecting to the larger world around him, let along history, creates raw candid and bracing drama out of all the unspoken race and class tensions that surround and on occasion intrude into our waking lives. This is by no means a simple task, and Haggis is sometimes lured into the pitfalls of emotional excess and contrived coincidences. Latching onto the current popularity of inverted narrative, where a connection among the characters is revealed later rather than sooner, Haggis builds his story with a measured and haunting pace. Spontaneous racial hostility and fear break out around a series of car crashes. A pair of young ghetto carjackers cause otherwise upstanding elites, like the wealthy housewife played by Sandra Bullock, to morph into perpetrators of foul racism, as against the Latino locksmith securing the newly paranoid women's front door. Matt Dillon, a cop who is stressed out by a medical bureaucracy that isnt properly caring for his ailing Father, irrationally retaliates by hurling mean spirited racial epithets over the phone to a Black medical office worker, and further on later works of his resentments by molesting an affluent Black female motorist (Thandie Newton) under the pretext of frisking her. These are just some examples of a film teeming with solemn recognition of the nasty complexities of living in a multi-cultural society, and much of what remains unspoken racially in America being neatly shoved under a complacent rug. But far from just a self-critical expose, Crash is also a search for goodness even in the darkness heart in real world we live in. And potential redemption that is in no way the easy happy ending, but tentatively seeks to lead in that enormously difficult direction"
by Prairie Miller, May 22nd 2007
As we can see from this review, Crash is not simply a film highlighting racism, but racism in all its forms. It reflects the need for a multi-culturalist society, to prevent the seperation of different cultures but also shows the inevitable difficulties whereby each race is taken advantage of and no respect is given or recieved. Focussing particularly on Sandra Bullocks character, we see a strong independant women fearful of her families safety within their own home after a car robbery, whilst on the contrary, the thieves themselves feel anger towards people sterotyping and being fearful of them because of their background. This presents a somewhat interesting analogy whereby sterotyping different cultures prevents the initial problem from being solved and in many ways makes the problem worse through exaggeration (i.e. Bullock wanting the locks changed again after she chooses not to trust the Latino locksmith).
The film poster above I also found to be quite iconic, where the man pictured holds his daughter in a strong embrace, at the part of the film when he thinks she has been shot, obviously reflecting gun crime as a major part of society. This is one of many film posters of which may in particular cause a discussion as the the film title does not immediatley relate to the image depicted, therefore creating controversy around the proposed reading of the text and what the director is trying to say to his audiences through this portrayal.
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