Crash

Year: 2005 Rating: R Overall Evaluation: 7.5 Significance Suppositions Story Style 9.0 / 10 9.0 / 10 7.0 / 10 5.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated R for language, sexual content and some violence. The language gets pretty strong and while there is not graphic sex or violence it is present and the imagination can fill in the details. I do not quite think these elements are gratuitious in that the movie is a "gritty picture of reality" - just be ready for it.

Story

This is a series of overlapping stories really. Each one is used as a vehichle to explore ethnic prejudices and stereotyping from different - and sometimes surprising - angles. There are good and bad cops, politicians, maids, families, drug pushers, illegal aliens, store owners, thieves . . . all walks of life - that suddenly crash into one another in various ways. At the end the camera kind of pulls back and shows how all these connections end up affecting everyone.

Suppositions

Prejudice is clearly the theme of the film yet it is not unrealstically liberal or conservative. Like the brilliant American History X prejudice is not shown as being simply based on ignorance. All different levels of bigotry are portrayed with various levels of reasoning behind them - demonstrating that not all "prejudice" is really pre-judging. Most stereotypes reflect reality to some extent (this is not really a "race" issue so much as it is a cultural one - a distinction many people miss or confuse). It takes a very steady hand to make a film dealing with racial issues that is realistic while being fair and well balanced - Crash does a pretty good job with this task.

Significance

Rather than simply dropping the ball and saying "Oh well, prejudice is here to stay - oh well," Crash offers hope. The hope is not a fairy-tale "let's all just hold hands and get along" ending though. Rather it is an eye-opening look at how our thoughts about others affect our actions and how those actions, in turn, may affect people's thoughts about us (or, more precisely, our "race"). The answer to prejudice is not to simply rid ourselves of our assumptions about others because that is impossible. Rather, we need to recognize and properly evaluate those assumptions so that we can be sure that we are interpreting reality correctly.