Written and directed by Paul Haggis, who authored the script for last year’s execrable Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), Crash has nothing to do with David Cronenberg’s same-titled 1996 film or with the J. G. Ballard book on which the Cronenberg film is based, one of the most brilliant English-language novels of the twentieth century. (Robert Moresco is credited with co-authoring the ingenious, shallow script with Haggis.) Then again, in a work ripe with stylistic and other kinds of borrowings, Haggis’s Crash (hereafter, Smash, out of respect for Cronenberg’s Crash) might be twanging a thematic chord from Ballard’s book. Its location is the ethnically diverse and mutually hostile City of Los Angeles in the present day, where, one of its characters tells us, people avoid touching one another, even in passing on a crowded street, and perhaps compensate, unconsciously, through car crashes. Metal and glass, shielding human skin, have become the new skin in this City of Voluminous Traffic. The Oscar-winning best picture ends (hilariously) with a roadway collision.
Smash makes no attempt to portray or characterize L.A. beyond matters of ethnic diversity, tension and commingling. Rather, it interweaves various lives so that different plot strands—and different races and ethnic groups, and classes—intersect. (If you will, collide.) Given that characters are shot at and shot to death, it is a film that is surprisingly lighthearted in tone. There are a few trenchant passages, but for the most part the film is light, amiable and extremely sentimental. Perhaps it is the unexpected snowfall in L.A. at Christmastime that reminded me of the New York-set Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944).
Actually, Smash more blatantly “borrows” from other works. Among these are Robert Altman’s interwoven tapestries (such as Nashville, 1975, and Shortcuts, 1993), Paul Thomas Anderson’s (such as Boogie Nights, 1997, and Magnolia, 1999) and, most especially, the late, lamented television series Boomtown, created by scenarist Graham Yost (Speed, 1994). As in episodes of the latter, the police narrative curves around in a crucial instance to repeat an incident whose human particulars become apparent and weigh in only in the second, much later occurrence. Since Smash largely deals with the L.A.P.D., L.A. criminals and an L.A. district attorney, the resemblance to Boomtown is unmistakable, and not to the advantage of the film. Smash is no Boomtown. (Smash doesn’t attempt Boomtown’s tack of presenting the same incident from the diverse viewpoints of different characters—the Rashomon-thing.)
It is a film far more fanciful than realistic. Examples of this fancifulness are profuse, but let me give one. One of the characters is a Mexican-American locksmith, a hardworking young man. Daniel and his wife have moved to a suburban neighborhood, in large measure to protect their very young daughter, who is still afraid of the gunshots in the street that she remembers from their old neighborhood. When Daniel discovers his child hiding underneath her bed at night, he imaginatively transfers from himself to her the invisible protective cloak he has been wearing, he tells her, since childhood. Now she is invincible! Daniel replaces a faulty lock in the front door of an Iranian-American’s shop. But for the safety he wants, the man really needs a new door, one that closes properly, and Daniel tells him this. The shopkeeper misunderstands Daniel, believing that what Daniel has told him means that Daniel hasn’t replaced the lock, which Daniel has done, and for which Daniel hands him the bill, which the shopkeeper refuses to pay. When the shop is broken into, vandalized and robbed, the shopkeeper wrongly assumes that Daniel is the culprit and tracks him down outside his home. When he pulls a gun on Daniel to kill him, Daniel’s daughter, watching in horror at a window, remembers that she is wearing the protective cloak and rushes out to protect her father. She is between the two men, clinging to her father, when the gun goes off. The shopkeeper’s daughter had mistakenly bought blanks for bullets, and no one is harmed—this, following a lot of slow-motion foolishness drawing out the agony of the child’s parents while they momentarily assume that their daughter has been killed. It isn’t the blanks I mind; who wouldn’t be happy that a child hasn’t been shot? The unrealistic part is this: the film has us infer and asks us to believe that Daniel, joyously relieved, will make no effort to bring the shopkeeper to justice for what was, after all, an act of attempted murder—an act that, had the bullets not been blanks (the fact of which the shopkeeper did not know), might have ended his daughter’s life or his own, or even possibly both their lives. I appreciate that this and other farfetched details contribute to the film’s social optimism; but do you see what I mean by “more fanciful than realistic”? Indeed, I take particular exception to the old loaded chestnut that minorities are expected to behave like saints—at least by lousy filmmakers.
Something else tears at the credibility of this film. Smash is schematic. Let me give an example of the schematic nature of the script. Ryan and Hanson are partnered police officers. Ryan is the veteran; Hanson, the rookie. Ryan is a decent sort; but because Affirmative Action (in his view) cost his father his job, his marriage and his self-respect, Officer Ryan acts like a racist—which means, as an urban cop, he is a racist. Well, his partner, a sensitive sort of guy, wants no part of that. Hanson asks to be and gets reassigned. As a farewell, Ryan warns Hanson that he, Hanson, doesn’t know himself as well as he thinks he does and time will reveal to him his true nature. One night, in civilian clothes, Hanson picks up a young black male hitchhiker and ends up shooting and killing the youth—all this, based on misjudging him and misinterpreting the boy’s words and movements. On the other hand, Ryan ends up heroically rescuing an African-American woman from a burning, overturned car—a citizen, I might add, whom he “finger fucked” in front of her husband, as part of a traffic stop “patting down” the night before in order to flaunt his contempt for blacks. (As the woman herself notes, there is no place in her form-clinging evening dress to hide a weapon.) She had been hysterical that Ryan should not touch her, even though she was pinned in her car, but she looks back at him, dazed and shook to her racist (or reverse-racist) soul, as the medics lead her away after Ryan has rescued her. The implication is that both her and Ryan’s lives are changed forever (a bit of a stretch, perhaps); but I object most to the rigged contrast between Ryan’s and Hanson’s natures and outcomes. Facile; pat; reductive.
That said, the rescue is heartpoundingly exciting and easily the best part of the film. Moreover, Ryan is the film’s most complex character. Matt Dillon, who has never given a bad performance as far as I know, is excellent as Ryan. The scenes in which he tends to his ailing father are wrenching. As an offset, Ryan Phillippe, who is among the most reliable of young American film actors, this time out is dreadful as Hanson. It appears that Haggis hasn’t been the least bit able to help this gifted actor understand what he is playing.
Indeed, the acting in this film is widely variable. Don Cheadle, one of the film’s producers, is good as a police detective, while Brendan Fraser, who cannot speak convincingly, much less act, and Sandra Bullock are atrocious as the district attorney and his nasty, flustered wife. Bullock’s role requires her to move the character into a more sympathetic key. She doesn’t do it; instead, Bullock changes the part on a dime, playing herself (a nice person) close to the bra in the hope that viewers will interpolate the transition that she needed to be working on throughout. Strikingly pretty woman, but one with no acting ability and very large feet.
The bastard that Fraser plays is cheating on his wife with his aide, the film implies. (The couple is childless.) The film also implies that this is okay because the mistress is self-supporting (unlike her rival!) and black. Progress!
There are no pets or animals of any kind in this film. I am beset by competing views. What kind of a person is Haggis that he imagines a world without any animals but us? What a clever guy that Haggis is in portraying our sterile, alienated, lonely contemporary urban world!
Would a cockateel have hurt?
