I disagree with White on many views since he is an absolutist but we share similar views here. This is the only critic I see dog this film. He confused Eva Mendez with Jennifer Esposito, though.

http://www.nypress.com/18/20/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm


WATTS THE MATTER WITH L.A.?
No, we can't just all get along.

By Armond White



Directed by Paul Haggis



Local critics praising Paul Haggis' Crash accidentally reveal racism so deeply hidden in their own privilege that they casually ignore it while expressing high-minded appreciation for this film's fake controversies. Nothing appeases a wounded culture more than a blanket condemnation of other people. Haggis' West Coast crazy quilt takes place so far away from reality that it has been greeted with an It-Couldn't-Happen-Here nonchalance.



Take The New Yorker's opening paen: "If there's an ill-tempered remark that has ever been uttered in the city of Los Angeles that hasn't found its way into Paul Haggis's Crash, I can't imagine what it is." But it is precisely a lack of imagination that allows one to accept Haggis' contrived coincidences and narrative flukes as a totalizing vision. The movie covers two days when L.A. residents of various ethnicities and professions cross paths and hurl unsurprising invectives. Haggis, who scripted the trumped-up melodrama Million Dollar Baby, once again facilitates critics' failure of imagination. That's how the entertainment complex works to sustain itself. These guardians of the status quo—Haggis among them—avoid admitting, confessing, realizing the real ways that social authority (whether legally held by the rich or criminally asserted by the poor) is used to the advantage of some people and against others.



Anyone who recognizes how people actually do talk about race and class should spot Haggis' contrivances as Neil LaBute-lite. "The racial comments are so blunt and the dialogue so incisive that you may want to shield yourself," cheered The New Yorker's American Sucker. Yet, the most cogent L.A. utterance recently recorded would probably be the 1996 Emerge Magazine quote of an L.A. disc jockey about the O.J. Simpson trial:Ê"If the word 'nigger' could light up the sky, Los Angeles wouldn't need street lights. That's how angry white people are." And that's a more vivid remark than any of the name-calling in Crash. Haggis dares to presume an L.A. expose without touching the firestorms of the O.J. or Rodney King trials. Backpedaling from those flashpoints and what they illuminated about social consciousness, he makes up a series of unbelievable random encounters.



Don Cheadle plays a black homicide detective who sleeps with his Latina partner (Eva Mendes). His mother (Beverly Todd) is a heroine addict, his brother (Larenz Tate) is a carjacker who, with his street homie (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges), steals a Navigator SUV that belongs to a district attorney (Brendan Fraser). When a Latino locksmith (Miguel Pena) refits the D.A.'s home security, the D.A.'s hostile wife (the film's producer, Sandra Bullock) insults the blue-collar worker. His problems continue when another dissatisfied customer—a paranoid Iranian shop-owner (Shaun Toub)—tracks down the locksmith and threatens his family. A third plot thread connects a middle-class black couple (Thandi Newton and Terence Howard) with a white racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his liberal partner (Ryan Phillippe). None of these entanglements reflects the culture of LaTasha Harlins, Reginald Denny, the Simi Valley jury or Michael Jackson's persecution/prosecution. Haggis creates a nightmare environment based on little more than his own middle-class white paranoia. Colored people are caricatures. Whites are tragic. Gullible critics applaud.



Crash appeals to the socially empowered—from The New Yorker to Entertainment Weekly—because its hackneyed melodrama doesn't demand imaginative self-examination. New Yorkers who mistake rudeness for honesty may also confuse insult for art. However, when the L.A. punk musicians X recorded "Los Angeles" in 1980, they looked at the tensions and prejudices from an upstart's position of social disgust. X got things right by admitting and undermining the twists of social and racial privilege. ("She started to hate every nigger and Jew/ Every Mexican who ever gave her a lot of shit/ Every homosexual and the idle rich/ It felt sad.")



In Haggis' dull perception, he blames Bullock's character for racial profiling but then demonstrates that her suspicions about black men are right. The Persian merchant's hysteria too closely recalls both Falling Down and the inane climax of The House of Sand and Fog (another shortcut to post-9/11 phobia). And the persistent reduction of the black male characters—Cheadle, Howard, Ludacris, Tate—to sputtering impotence reveals no personal empathy. Haggis' inability to humanize these types beyond sentimentalizing their confusion proves his exploitation impulse. It's the easy, comfortable route. So The New Yorker enthuses, "The tangle of mistrust, misunderstanding, and foul temper envelops everyone; no one is entirely innocent or entirely guilty." But good art doesn't deal with guilt/innocent binaries; those are judgmental terms used by social arbiters—or editorial writers. Crash's spurious raves reveal that film journalists play some part in reinforcing the ideologies we either participate in or resist.



It's some kind of cruel joke that Haggis' soap opera is praised by the very critics who ignored the miraculous, humanist vision of John Boorman's In My Country, and who just weeks ago praised the conventional black boogie-man racism of The Interpreter. They also rejected the challenge of Todd Solondz's recent and unnerving social satires. "Nothing to think about" snorted The New Yorker's dismissal of Palindromes. Well then, think about the ugly confrontation enshrined in Crash's advertising: Newton and Dillon in an anguished caress, summing up how the white cop who sexually molested a black woman saves her from a burning car wreck just a few hours later. This iconography—a febrile sequel to Monster's Ball—is simply shameless. Plus, the film is set at Christmas! Angelic chants underscore moments of stress!



Haggis doesn't have LaBute's art pretentions or misanthropy; but his earnest intentions are worse because they stand in the way of a cleansing mea culpa. Crash's message of nostra culpa allows everyone to look past how society goes bad. EW surmises: "Violent contact—in word or on wheels—is the only way left to reach out and touch somebody." That's limousine-liberal crap. (Black playwright August Wilson gave a better illustration in a recent Time magazine interview, relating an incident in which a white man at a diner moved his tip away from Wilson. "As if I wanted his two dollars!" Wilson sighed.)



Hostile behavior arises from cultural habits far less dramatic than any in Crash. It's a self-satisfying fantasy to think that exacerbating social problems braves a tough, modern truth. Haggis' guilt-orgy represents the same cynical attitude by which contemporary critics consider themselves superior to such politically astute and spiritually rich films as Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Haggis wins praise for congratulating our critical constabulary about the fears they already hold (which in the past has made them insensitive to superior probings into race such as The Glass Shield, Smoke, Kansas City, Amistad, Beloved, Storytelling).



Progress eludes film culture when garbage like Crash is praised for its "brutal honesty." That's the pat on the back director-writer Haggis was after and precisely the non-response that makes the film's confrontation with racism ineffectual. Except for Bullock, who knowingly strikes the perfect, sorrowfully awakened note of destructive egotism, Crash is laughably implausible. But the media commendation it's garnered ("a must-see film") is dangerous. Shills have a stake in keeping the culture deluded, leaving viewers locked in their own prejudices, as divided as ever.



Volume 18, Issue 20
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