Do this job for a few more years. Do it a little longer. You think you know who you are, but you have no idea.

I've been meaning to watch Crash for a long time and finally got around to it this weekend. This is a great movie. It's one of these movies that bounce between lots of different characters, whose stories intersect in ways only a carefully scripted movie could. Often times this plot device falls over, they don't strike the right balance of commonality between the stories and keeping them seperate enough that the characters are distinct.

This movie took a different turn. Other movies with this structure bind it all together by having the characters be related or people who share a common experience. Crash works a little differently. All the stories are related by their theme of race relations, and the resulting misunderstandings and isolation. The movie bounces between the stories, doing very little exposition, but it's always easy to follow what's going on.

This film keeps feeling like it's going to be ridiculously tragic, but doesn't end up being that hard to watch. It's certainly not a positive movie, and I did feel sad when I was done watching, but it wasn't downright depressing. I think my biggest take away was that the whole thing was that the situations were tragic in their base. The characters are stuck in their isolation, created by racial devides, and no one is breaking out of that and reaching across the gap.

Those are the kinds of troubles we get into all the time. Most major misunderstandings start out as minor ones. People see the same thing in different ways, and those differences start to amplify. When we don't make an effort to bridge that gap, to find common ground - that's when things get bad. This movie was example after example of people not reaching out across that gap - and the unfortunate things that come from that.

Still want more?
Read the Archives!