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is. And there are more. And how can we possibly be interested in following around so many people especially these people, who all seem to have such contempt for each other and for life in general? Because, damnit, Haggis and Moresco really make us want to follow them. They make us want to listen to them to really listen and to get a sense of where they're coming from. How do they do it? Simple: as any director or writer worth his salt knows how to do, they give each of their many, talented performers the one thing that any sincere actor craves. They give them words that are interesting, and that have the dramatic pull of authenticity. In other words, they give them a brain which is to say, a good, thoughtful screenplay to bite into.

I guess the best thing I can say about "Crash" (something that's not easy to say about a lot of movies) is that it's never dull. It's constantly alive, burning with the passion of important filmmaking. It strives itself to be important, strives to teach, to inform, to show us the error of our ways. It wants to tell how all about how we have gone wrong and how we can do better. In short, it strives to be called great. What I see, though, is a film struggling to maintain the tremendous weight of its own self-importance. Where it goes wrong where Haggis and Moresco go wrong is in oversimplifying their stated goals by reaching for false sentiment and exaggerated emotion in the last half of their movie. It is surprising to me that it fails to really be the classic that it might have been. It falls short of greatness, I think, because it wants too much to beat on the drums of racism, and to follow a few too many ideas, and winds up sprinting itself out. The writer-director team, it seems, are so abhorrently troubled by race relations that they have made every one of their characters explicit mouthpieces for it. To compensate for their breathless pace of ideas in the first hour ideas that are propelled forward with a ferocious sense moral chaos that is kind of brilliant their film really has to reach out and grasp for the artifice of explicitly dramatized feelings in its second half. If it were a bit smarter, a bit more artfully conceived, it may well have known how to avoid such shortcuts. It may have known how to define its themes more meaningfully without underscoring them so directly. In short, it may have been great.

I won't skimp on the compliments, however. I'll give credit where credit is due. Haggis' "Crash" has no such illusions: it knows that racism, violence, and the stereotypes remain; they are a burden that we all must bear, because we are all equally different and equally flawed. The movie dares to face these flaws with unflinching honesty, dares to know the hurt in understanding our human failings, and, most of all, dares with a desperate urgency to correct these failings or, at least to try; because it is essential that we try. Really, the film tries to change the world, and change us, in the little ways that it knows how, and Haggis and Moresco deserve praise for that, because that is what great movies try to do. Crash is not quite great it lacks the central focus and thematic intensity that make films like "Do the Right Thing" (Spike Lee's own take on the racial divide) and Altman's "Short Cuts," and "Nashville" true masterworks of social commentary. But it has the spirit and charge of a cause worth fighting for: the cause toward change.

Learn more about this author, Scott Mackeen.
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