by Chris Marshall:
My first draft of this post consisted of just one word: “Garbage.”
Maybe that’s a little too uncharitable, but it summed up my feelings
immediately after watching Crash.
That being said, though, in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out
that I was already biased against the film before going into it, simply because
of all the negative criticism I’ve read about it over the past few years.
But I’m pretty sure I never would have liked this, even if I
went into it totally blind. I’m not against “message films” in principle, but I
prefer not to be bludgeoned over the head with that message. There is literally
not a single scene in this movie that can’t be boiled down to one of the
following formulae: two people of different races being racist toward one
another or two people of the same race talking about how bad racism is.
The thing is, that’s not a bad message at all. The problem
is that it’s not a new or insightful or useful message. This is something that
everybody knows already. I’m not claiming that racists don’t exist; they do,
and they’re terrible. Most of the time, though, racism doesn’t take the
blatant, overt form on display in Crash.
The characters in this movie just openly hate people of other races.
