By the point Jack Nicholson got here on stage to current Finest Image on the 2006 Academy Awards, most viewers had been assured that Ang Lee’s gay-themed Western romance Brokeback Mountain (2005) would take dwelling the prize, having already gained Finest Director, Tailored Screenplay, and Authentic Rating (in addition to the highest awards on the Golden Globes and BAFTAs). As an alternative, upon opening the envelope, a visibly stunned Nicholson declared, “And the Oscar goes to…Crash!”
The victory of author/director Paul Haggis’ sprawling ensemble drama about racial stress in Los Angeles got here as a serious shock to many critics, who broadly criticized the movie’s shallow commentary, questionable character arcs, and disjointed narrative. Acclaimed creator Ta-Nehisi Coates even referred to as it “The Worst Film of the Decade.”
Nonetheless, each earlier than and after the Oscars, Crash did have one notable advocate: eminent American movie critic Roger Ebert. Ebert, who named Crash one of the best movie of the 12 months, utterly disagreed with the crucial consensus on the movie, as an alternative discovering it clever and emotionally highly effective. Even amidst the fierce backlash to Crash‘s victory on the Oscars, Ebert wrote a number of columns staunchly defending each the movie and the Academy.
Critics Clashed Over ‘Crash’
Crash
- Launch Date
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Could 6, 2005
- Runtime
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112 minutes
Mockingly sufficient, a lot of the criticism of Crash was directed at its Oscar-winning script, which many critics discovered clunky, unsubtle, and reliant on stereotypes. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, for example, felt that “too usually [the characters] act in ways in which archetypes, slightly than human beings, do.” Equally, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “I don’t assume there’s a single human being in Crash. As an alternative you have got arguments and propaganda violently bumping into one another, impressed with their very own quirkiness. (‘Hey look, I’m a Black carjacker who resents being stereotyped.’)” Nonetheless, Ebert expressed the exact opposite sentiment in his preliminary evaluate, writing:
Haggis writes with such directness and such an excellent ear for on a regular basis speech that the characters appear actual and believable after just a few phrases.
Moreover, a number of conflicts within the movie are shortly resolved via melodramatic one-on-one interactions that seemingly redeem the bigoted characters. As an illustration, Jean (Sandra Bullock), the spouse of a District Lawyer (Brendan Fraser), wrongly suspects that her dwelling’s Latino locksmith is a felony, solely to later tearfully hug her Latina housemaid when she tends to her sprained ankle.
Likewise, a racist cop (Matt Dillon) pulls over a Black couple below false pretenses and proceeds to grope the spouse (Thandiwe Newton) whereas her Black husband (Terrence Howard) helplessly watches. Nonetheless, the cop later rescues the identical girl from a flaming automobile wreck, a grandiose sequence accentuated by an intensely schmaltzy rating and cinematography that frames the rescue as a transcendentally stunning second of reconciliation.
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A Examine of Racism Meant to Placate White Individuals
Many critics argued that this sort of storytelling placates white viewers and undermines its ostensibly progressive racial politics. Clarisse Loughrey of The Unbiased in contrast Crash to fellow controversial Finest Image winners Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Inexperienced E-book (2018), arguing that every one three movies “current […] racism as nothing greater than a character situation in want of a repair […] absolv[ing their] white viewers of any sense of collective duty.”
However Ebert defended the characters’ arcs, calling them “parables, wherein characters be taught the teachings they’ve earned by their conduct.” Whereas Coates, Loughrey, and different critics noticed Crash‘s racial commentary as milquetoast at greatest and offensive at worst, Ebert had a extra optimistic view of the movie’s strategy to tackling racism: “I don’t anticipate Crash to work any miracles, however I imagine anybody seeing it’s prone to be moved to have somewhat extra sympathy for folks not like themselves.”
A Combined Legacy
Within the years following the 2006 Oscars, the consensus opinion that Crash should not have gained Finest Image has solely additional solidified. In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter surveyed tons of of Academy voters and located that the majority would now vote for Brokeback Mountain over Crash. That very same 12 months, Haggis himself revealed in an interview with Alan Sepinwall that even he does not assume Crash deserved Finest Image: “Was it one of the best movie of the 12 months? I do not assume so. There have been nice movies that 12 months.” And there have been; Crash gained the Oscar for Finest Authentic Screenplay, however each different nominee is arguably higher (Syriana, Match Level, The Squid and the Whale, and Good Night time, and Good Luck). Different nominated movies that 12 months embrace A Historical past of Violence, Capote, Howl’s Transferring Fort, Stroll the Line, Munich, and Junebug.
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Even so, Roger Ebert remained stalwart in his protection of Crash. In two separate 2006 columns, one printed earlier than the Oscars and the opposite proper after, Ebert insisted that Crash was extra complicated and fewer problematic than its many critics claimed: “It isn’t a ‘secure harbor.’ […] It’s a film of uncooked confrontation in regards to the complexity of our motives, about how racism works not solely high down however sideways, and the way in several conditions, we’re all able to behaving shamefully.”
He even attacked fellow critics Kenneth Turan and Nikki Finke for positing that homophobia performed a job in Brokeback Mountain‘s Finest Image loss. (Ebert was at the least partially unsuitable right here, as Brokeback Mountain co-writer and co-producer Diana Ossana advised The Advocate that actors Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis publicly refused to see her movie attributable to its subject material and speculated that many different older male actors privately did the identical.) To high all of it off, Ebert even named Crash one of many 20 greatest movies of the 2000s.
Ebert Nonetheless Deserves a Thumbs-Up
Making an attempt to parse Ebert’s causes for praising Crash so effusively when most of his fellow critics dismissed it’s tough, to say the least. His repute for being so astute and well-read on the formal and narrative methods of filmmaking may lead one to imagine that there was one thing about Crash that he observed however everybody else missed — one thing which may show that it is an ideal movie in any case. However, one may also be tempted to ascribe his admiration for a film criticized by outstanding folks of colour like Ta-Nehisi Coates to his private biases as an older white man.
In any occasion, although, two factors should be made. First, simply because a well-known and well-respected movie critic likes a film doesn’t suggest different persons are obligated to love it as nicely. Secondly, Ebert’s unpopular opinion on one movie does not in any means nullify his observations about different movies. In any case, film critics are identical to everybody else — human beings with their very own tastes, biases, and views.
Anybody trying to type their very own opinion of Crash can view it at no cost on The CW’s web site via this hyperlink. The movie can also be streaming at no cost on Plex, Fandango at Residence, and The Roku Channel.