Review: Crash

I finally got around to seeing Crash tonight. As you have probably heard, this is an excellent movie. A little hard to follow at times, but well worth the effort.

There is really no way to summarize this movie. There is no bad guy, no good guy (well… I’ll come back to that), no happy ending in the traditional sense, but neither is it a sad ending: life just continues with all of its problems. That isn’t to say that nothing happens – far from it: characters grow by leaps and bounds due to events in the two days depicted in the film. Just about every character’s life has a significant shift by the end. Many questions are presented, and there are no answers provided. But when the credits roll you feel like everything was wrapped up, while at the same time realizing that nothing came to a close. It’s as if you just got to watch important pieces of these characters’ real lives, and that they are still out there somewhere, dealing with the repercussions and living on.

The movie shines a light on, and is primarily driven by, the stereotypes that direct our actions and reactions — those that define us, whether we like it or not. It shows how stereotypes can force us to live by their rules by defining the world around us, even when we rebel against them. Obviously they are magnified and dramatized, and the intersections of the various characters lives are at times a little too convenient, but the entire movie felt very plausible – just as if life had been condensed to fit in the time allotted.

Every character’s arc was compelling, but the one that hit me the most was the locksmith’s story. If anyone in this movie could be called “the good guy” it was him. With everything that happened to him, he treated everyone kindly and just tried to live his life. It would also be accurate (as my wife pointed out) to call him “the victim” (though, really, that title could apply to most characters). He’d obviously worked to get out of a bad neighborhood, but problems just seemed to follow him. When he gave his little girl his invisible cloak of invulnerability (trust me, it works in the movie), my wife saw the foreshadowing and dreaded the outcome of his story. I won’t tell you whether she was right or not, but the climax of that arc was easily the most affecting moment for me.

The goal of this movie was obviously to make the audience consider its prejudices and it met its goal. In fact, I’d say this is probably the most intelligent and “real” story I’ve ever seen on the subject.

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