(Note: this was written yesterday night and I was completely unaware that IT WAS Oscar night. Serendipity… I left the text unaltered. I’m glad for the outcome: 3 awards including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay)
Yesterday I finally saw the, by now famous, 2004 movie by Paul Haggis, Crash.
There’s no mistaking it as one of the best movies of this young century and I’ll be secretly pushing for it on Oscar night.
Counting on a vast and competent cast, Crash reminds us at times of P. T. Andersson’s Magnolia albeit profiting a lot on the shorter duration and the popularity, universality and reality of its central theme: racism.
Through the eyes of several different characters living their daily routines in modern Los Angeles, the viewer is constantly confronted with examples of intolerance. Haggis opts for a magnificent approach at times showing us the pitfalls of intolerance and at times the immense advantages of rennouncing it.
Crash should not be confused with other more naive movies about the subject. Especially because it contains a delightful detail, which is the altruistic and brutally realistic idea of the pervasiness of racism and intolerance and what I like to term as the “wholeness of human character”, that is, the conclusion that no human being is only “good” or only “bad”, this meaning actually that “good” people, or people as so perceived, will end up doing very “bad” deeds and “bad” people, or people as so perceived, will end up saving the day.
In the end, Crash is thus also a movie about the randomness of life and human deeds. What Kundera would call The Lightness Of Being.
Tagline: “You think you know who you are. You have no idea.”
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