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Best-Picture Winner Crash Just Turned 15. Is Anybody Celebrating?

“I believe that occasionally a film comes along that can have an influence for the better, and maybe even change us a little,” wrote the late Roger Ebert in 2006 . The line comes not from his (famous? infamous?) four-star review of Paul Haggis’s Crash , but rather from a follow-up on the movie written months later in response to fellow critics—a good number of whom had already been talking a little too much shit about the film, months before a surprised Jack Nicholson announced it as 2006’s best-picture winner and launched Crash -hating as a competitive sport.

The movie, an intricate, message-first melodrama of racial and social animus set in contemporary Los Angeles, was Ebert’s number one pick of the year. It appeared on a handful of other major lists too: Entertainment Weekly , Rolling Stone , Time , the Washington Post , LA Weekly . So Ebert was hardly alone in loving the film, which had the added public appeal of a broad, well-known cast: Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Ludacris, Terrence Howard, Brendan Fraser, Ryan Phillippe, Jennifer Esposito, Thandie Newton, Michael Peña, Larenz Tate, Shaun Toub.

Had he been the movie’s only critical defender, Ebert still wouldn’t have been alone in his affection. Crash grossed $98 million worldwide on a $6.5 million budget thanks, in no insignificant part, to word of mouth. That’s an especially impressive take for what is essentially a mid-budget adult drama, the kind of film Hollywood had allegedly stopped making even in 2004. It’s all the more impressive for a movie whose development history began with every financier in America and Canada turning it down —and later, one imagines, regretting that decision.

When you add those Academy Awards to the mix (wins for editing, original screenplay and picture; nominations for Dillon as supporting actor, Haggis’s direction, and Bird York’s song “In the Deep”), Crash seems like a respected and fondly remembered movie, if not a universally beloved one. But that would be a surprise to anyone who’s gotten into an argument about the movie since its release 15 years ago this week. Its reputation has been nothing if not fraught.

Even the Academy doesn’t stand by the film anymore. In 2015, a Hollywood Reporter poll of “hundreds” of Academy members showed that, were they voting in 2015, the 2005 best-picture trophy would have gone to that year’s ostensibly more progressive choice: Ang Lee’s gay cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain . (I take that poll with a grain of salt, by the way, because the Academy grows its membership yearly and gradually becomes a different voting body.) Haggis himself doesn’t necessarily back the criticisms, but he has conceded that his directorial debut shouldn’t have won. “Was it the best film of the year? I don’t think so,” he told Hitfix, now Uproxx, in 2015 . “There were great films that year. Good Night, and Good Luck —amazing film. Capote —terrific film. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain , great film. And [Steven] Spielberg’s Munich . I mean, please, what a year.”

Public opinion is a wild, vacillating, highly contingent thing, and history’s winners get the strictest scrutiny. It’s pretty easy to imagine a world in which Crash didn’t beat Brokeback for best picture, and was instead consigned to that annually enlarged list of Oscar nominees few of us think about post-Oscars—and even fewer of us can recall seeing, even if we liked them at the time. (I’d name names but, to my point, I don’t remember them.) It’s easy too to imagine a world in which Crash won in a lower-stakes fight and didn’t have to bear the overwrought social implications of its win over “the gay cowboy movie.” Crash versus Argo ? That would have been another Oscar year.

In that alternative universe, would Crash still have been ranked 90 (out of 92) on Vulture’s recent ranking of every best-picture winner ? (How it ranked below Out of Africa —which is worse if only because it’s so dehumanizingly boring —is beyond me.) Without the misbegotten Oscar fanfare and subsequent public discourse to fan him on, would Ta-Nehisi Coates still have called Crash “the worst movie of the decade” ? Would an anniversary of the movie’s release even merit attention?

I vote no. Bad movies happen to good people every week, to the Academy every year, and to me practically every day. Nevertheless, we persist. I would sooner say Crash is a gratingly mediocre movie than an irredeemably bad one. Actually, I would sooner say nothing at all, because, in truth, Crash is a movie that I almost never think about.

Rewatching it recently, though, brought me back—back to the sound of Cheadle intoning, in the film’s opening moments, that sometimes people crash into each other to feel connection. (This is his daring philosophical insight into the vehicular incident he survived just moments before.) Back to the audio-visual stench of the film’s broad moral posturing, every one of its scenes an excuse for discourse on the film’s prevailing themes, which get stuffed into the mouths of people whose problems—bad-faith political maneuvering, colorism, sexual assault—are more real than even this movie seems to realize. Back to the sight—the truly splendid, shocking sight—of Sandra Bullock being pushed down the stairs by a screenplay, for no better reason than to engineer an astonishing closing line to the Latina maid who saves her, though she’s never before treated her maid like a person: “You’re the best friend I’ve got.” A better movie would have known that this is a laugh line.

None of this obscures the reasons Crash won best picture, which to me have never really been so obscure. Utter shock at its win, which apparently persists to the present, overlooks the hints scattered among the tea leaves.

True, Haggis’s movie was only the second film to win best picture at the Oscars without having been nominated in either best-picture category at the Golden Globes. Yet it did win outstanding performance from a cast at the SAG Awards, the closest category the acting guild has to a “best picture” and, importantly, a not-unreliable indicator that a film has momentum. (See also: Shakespeare in Love triumphing over Saving Private Ryan at the SAGs before it clobbered the Spielberg favorite at the Oscars .) And despite its lack of love from the Golden Globes, Haggis’s film did get a best-picture nod overseas, from the BAFTAs, where it earned a heaping nine nominations overall—more than even Hollywood was willing to throw its way and, perhaps tellingly, just as many nominations as Brokeback .

So why did Crash beat Brokeback on Oscar night? Homophobia has routinely been presented as a viable conclusion, and I don’t doubt that it played a role. But I think Crash won because of what it is, what it does, rather than because of what Brokeback isn’t. In a Vulture oral history from a few years ago , producer Cathy Schulman recounted reading the script for the first time while ignoring her black mailman, who was trying to get her attention. She realized, in that moment, that she was Sandra Bullock: “I’m thinking, I’m a bitch. I’m a racist. I felt guilty. He was just trying to be nice, and I was a bitch! I felt really callous in that moment; I felt the same kind of separation from my fellow human being that was in the script.”

This must be the change in people that Ebert says the film inspired. I wouldn’t call it a change; as world views go, it certainly isn’t inspired. But it’s what I think many people felt, feel, when they watch this movie, which thrives on the chaos of its connections, its eagerness to flip the switch. One moment a black character is righteously sermonizing about the realities of gentrification and white fear; the next, he’s hijacking a car. This is irony befitting satire, but Crash , bless it, plays it straight.

Crash and Brokeback seem to represent opposite poles on the limited spectrum of Hollywood progressivism. Neither is as radical as its defenders would claim, just as Hollywood progressivism isn’t nearly as liberal, really, as its proponents would claim. But Brokeback , at least, was a legitimate cultural breakthrough for its time, assuming that we take the Hollywood mainstream and the box office to be the only significant measures of cultural breakthroughs. In the specific and discrete context of capital- H Hollywood, which teemed from the start with gay artists and stars and yet has very rarely taken queerness on as a mainstream subject, Brokeback is a watershed. If we look beyond Hollywood to the long history of queer and more often than not underground films, two gay cowboys spit-lubing in a camping tent is probably more comfortably labeled “pulp” than progressivism. It’s old news.

But Brokeback , with its high-profile director and stars and its legitimate box office success, got more eyes on the issue than those more radical works (whose audiences were smaller because they were more political)—and did more, in a country that had yet to even sanction gay marriage, to normalize what had so often been marginalized in American media. It didn’t need to win best picture for this material impact to be notable. Its box office receipts handled that well enough on their own, opening the door to more projects in a similar vein and a noticeable mainstreaming of LGBT—or at least LG—culture.

The Academy was expected to prove, for its own sake, that it was willing to play a decisive part in that normalization. Instead, it chose Crash —the less-progressive candidate, you could say. Both movies are ultimately efforts to humanize. Both do so familiarly. Brokeback , for example, is a romance rendered impossible by social circumstance: a very legible, often engaging premise for a movie. And Crash , for all its interweaving and cross-cutting and climactic spiritualism, is a throwback to a familiar strain of Oscar-friendly, liberal message movie—in which the “message,” often, is that people are complicated, goodness is relative, and evil is not a terminal condition. It dramatizes racism the same way that classical Hollywood storytelling has long dramatized things: through a sense of character and intention and a guise of psychological realism, through arcs and archetypes, through a slow climb toward third-act revelations about who people really are as evinced by the things they’ve achieved, the changes they’ve undergone by film’s end.

In Crash and in the movies of its ilk, social ills are all interpersonal and individual—not systemic. Most importantly, they’re not insurmountable, as films like American History X , with its tale of a neo-Nazi murderer turning a new leaf in prison, have labored to suggest. When Crash does get systemic—when, for example, a black police chief decides to overlook a complaint about misconduct against Dillon’s cop with a “poor me” speech about the sacrifices he had to make to become a black police chief—it gets goofy.

In films like Crash , racism isn’t a matter of who you are , what you believe, or how you fundamentally understand the world. You aren’t racist, even if you do racist things —because you could just as well learn to do better. Like Dillon’s cop saving a black woman he’d previously assaulted from a fiery blaze, you could have that racism overridden by more virtuous instincts. Because people, you’ll recall, crash into each other .

It isn’t always clear, in Crash and other less-than-great message movies, how the prejudicial social systems that encourage these collisions and make them inevitable, intractable, and oft-repeated fit into this equation. Nor do these films always own up to the unsubtle defensiveness of their position. Someone, somewhere apparently said that racist cops can’t also care for their dying fathers, or that rich white women can’t also be legitimately shaken after a carjacking. Someone apparently said that racist people are just racist—not people—so that the addition of a few human qualities, like fear or paternal love, can seem like dramatic complication.

None of that scans, really. Yet I remain unconvinced that we should care so much—that every time a Green Book triumphs , we have to invoke the Crash controversy.

There’s a character in Haggis’s film, played by Ludacris, who comes off like a white screenwriter’s attempt to “do Spike Lee. ” Thankfully, I have Spike Lee’s actual movies to turn to instead. Sandra Bullock’s entitled, prejudiced politician’s wife isn’t endemic to Crash , either; melodramas, especially from the age of the “women’s picture,” have plenty to say about the prejudicial undercurrents of white domestic life. So, again: I’m all set. The inclination, 15 years after its release, is to assume that Crash ’s win matters. Really, as with most things, it only matters as much as we let it.

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Five New Juicy Costume Dramas to Add Glamour to Your Quarantine

K. Austin Collins

K. austin collins is a film critic for *vanity fair.*.

Accidents Will Happen

(Photo credit: Courtesy of Lions Gate Films)

At the start of Crash , Don Cheadle gets into a nighttime fender-bender primarily, it would seem, so he can state the theme of the movie right off the bat: “We crash into each other so we can feel something,” he mutters portentously. You may feel like groaning a little, but that, mercifully, is the last obvious line uttered in this film. Cheadle turns out to be a police detective on his way to investigate a murder—a body found by the side of a Los Angeles road. A bit later, in a shift so abrupt it could come from a different movie, we’re quickly introduced to two casually dressed young black men, Anthony and Peter (Ludacris and Larenz Tate), walking briskly along a posh L.A. street, complaining about the poor service they just received at a restaurant because, Anthony is convinced, the wait staff thought “we’re black, and black people don’t tip.” They argue amusingly about this possibility—clearly, they carry the unending pressure of casual racism as both an everyday occurrence and, depending on their moods, something to be shrugged off or confronted with righteous anger.

They pass a formally attired white couple, played by Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser, on the street, and when Ludacris’s Anthony notices Bullock squeeze Fraser’s arm tighter as they walk by the black men, he mutters a funny line about “overcaffeinated white people,” and then does something that blindsides us and immediately lifts Crash to a heightened level of intensity: He pulls out a gun, leads them back to their big SUV, and carjacks the couple.

It’s a great moment: shocking and scary and almost absurd—a laugh catches in your throat. The focus of Crash then shifts to Bullock and Fraser as victims—we follow them home, where Bullock—playing Jean, a racist harpy with all stops out, doing full penance for her recent Miss Congeniality 2 —castigates her husband for his timidity, insists that the locks on their huge house be replaced immediately, and makes loud racist slurs when a Latino man (Michael Pena) comes to perform this labor.

Now we start to recognize the shape Crash is going to take: With each introduction of a new character, the movie gets passed along like a football, or a hot potato—we then learn about the Latino man’s home life, which in turn leads to subplots about an Iranian shopkeeper, with a big swerve into the life of a cruel cop, played by Matt Dillon, who takes grim delight in humiliating a wealthy black TV producer and his wife (Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton) during a routine traffic-violation stop.

First-time film director Paul Haggis, who co-wrote Crash with Bobby Moresco, reaped praise for his adaptation of F. X. Toole’s fiction in the script for Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby , but Haggis’s original work for television, in short-lived, complex series like EZ Streets and Michael Hayes , established him as a fellow who likes to take genre conventions, invest them with moral weight, and give them unexpected twists. Eventually, though, Crash becomes too much of a Rubik’s Cube of a movie: We start looking for the shifts and patterns that will force disparate characters to interact with each other, usually in moments of stress. Haggis wants to tell us that racial conflict is always bubbling beneath the surface of contemporary Los Angeles—not a new thought, since we’ve learned that in everything from the Rodney King trial to the fiction of Walter Mosley. And the big-name, small-part, large-ensemble cast is a gambit that’s been used by directors ranging from Robert Altman to Spike Lee to John Sayles to (Haggis’s most obvious influence) Lawrence Kasdan, in the latter’s underrated Grand Canyon .

It’s smart, therefore, that Haggis has written such novel, precisely observed, often unpleasant characters as the ones Bullock, Dillon, and Cheadle inhabit. And if Crash ultimately resolves itself around a series of sentimental familial tableaux (a child placed in danger; a grown son caring for his sick father; a wayward young brother rescued from grave punishment by his elder sibling), it also makes its social and political collisions resonate in our heads so as to leave them ringing. It’s a film you won’t stop thinking about, arguing over, debating, after the lights come up.

  Before Paul Haggis hit pay dirt in the movies with Million Dollar Baby and Crash , he enjoyed a successful career in a genre decidedly less highbrow: prime-time sitcoms . His writing credits during that fertile period include schlockily lovable seventies and eighties series like One Day at a Time, The Love Boat, Diff’rent Strokes , and Facts of Life —and eventually one-hour dramas like L.A. Law and thirtysomething . As Crash gets its theatrical release, Haggis seems to have left the small screen behind: He’s currently working on a big-budget military drama , Death and Dishonor , for Warner Bros.  

Crash Directed by Paul Haggis. Lions Gate Films. R.

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HOW CRASH CRASHED THE OSCARS

An oral history of one of the most shocking Best Picture wins ever.

In 2006,  Crash,  a contemporary film about racism made on a $6 million budget, shocked Hollywood, and  its own creators , when it won Best Picture at the Oscars — the result of a prescient producing team, a famously canny awards campaign, and an unanticipated flood of support for this apparent underdog to the heavy favorite,  Brokeback Mountain.  The story of how  Crash  upended the industry — and changed how Oscar campaigns are waged — is best told by co-writer–director Paul Haggis and the industry players who experienced the film’s journey from a cast-aside TV concept to perhaps the most surprising Best Picture winner of all time.

PAUL HAGGIS, director, co-writer:  In August 2001, I was fired from my own television show, CBS’s  Family Law.  It was the second time this had happened in my career, the first being when I was fired from  The Facts of Life.  I had been grateful to work in TV for so long but had always been chasing a career as a feature writer-director and had completely failed. I had optioned the rights to F.X. Toole’s short story  Million Dollar Baby,  written it on spec, and sent it around starting in 2000. I wanted to direct it, but it was very quickly made clear to me that no one wanted me to direct. [ Laughs. ] In late 2001, the thought of going back to television was just eating my soul. My then-wife, Deborah, said to me, “You know that TV-show idea you had? You should write it as a movie. You’ll win an Oscar.” I went, “Oh, okay.” [ Laughs. ] She reminds me of this all the time. It was an outline for a concept I’d written about how prevalent feelings of racism were in America; the decisions we make about people based on their look, race, and ethnicity. The stereotypes we pretend that we reject are ingrained in our DNA. I’d taken the concept around, but nobody wanted it. So I pulled out the 35-page outline again and remembered why I loved it so much. I called my friend Bobby Moresco and said, “I think this is a movie.”

BOBBY MORESCO, co-writer:  I liked it, but there was just too much there to be a movie. How could we possibly turn all these stories into one piece?

HAGGIS:  I’d originally done two years’ worth of research to prepare the pitch. I’d held town-hall-style interview meetings in my living room with people. I wanted to understand the experiences of living in different areas of Los Angeles after getting used to only the whiter parts of town. L.A. is so segregated, but no one ever talks about it. I told Bobby, “In the first 30 minutes, we’re going reinforce every stereotype. We’re going to tell the audience, ‘I know you’re a big liberal, but you can laugh because we all know Hispanics park their cars on their lawns and Asians can’t drive. Relax. No one’s gonna know you’re laughing.’” And then we’re going to turn it around so you leave the theater questioning everything. I sat at the keyboard and Bobby read the pages and threw out ideas. Then we’d rewrite. It was very quick. And then we got turned down by every financier in America and Canada.

CATHY SCHULMAN, producer:  I had a company at the time called Bullseye Entertainment, and financier Bob Yari had essentially bought half the company. He sent me a pile of scripts and asked, “Why don’t you see if there’s anything there?” On a rare rainy Saturday afternoon in L.A., I’m curled up on the couch alone in the house. I’m really engrossed reading  Crash,  and then there’s this knocking on my window and it’s my mailman. I look away because he normally just puts the mail in the mailbox. And he knocks even harder. And I shoo him away. I’m in the middle of the script! And then he gives me this really sour look. I throw the script down kind of in a huff and run to the front door, and I realize there was a big package he was trying to hand to me so it didn’t get wet. So he left it out in the rain. And I wanted to call him to come back and say thanks, but I didn’t know his name. He was African-American and had been coming to my house for years. And I go, “Sir, sir!,” and he comes back and I try to apologize. It’s very uncomfortable. Then I go back to reading and I realize I’m literally the character that ends up as Sandra Bullock’s character. I’m thinking,  I’m a bitch. I’m a racist.  I felt guilty. He was just trying to be nice and I was a bitch! I felt really callous in that moment; I felt the same kind of separation from my fellow human being that was in the script. Paul and Bobby really wanted us to make the movie in-house, but we didn’t have the money so marched all around town. And everywhere I went, people were like “Oh, for God’s sake, Cathy, a movie about racism?” It was really hard to raise the money.

HAGGIS:  Then Bob Yari says, “Okay, we’ll give you around $7.5 million if you get X number of movie stars.” That all started with casting Don Cheadle, who also signed on as a producer. But it was made very clear to me that his name meant nothing, which I took to mean had a lot to do with the fact that he was black. We’re making a movie about this exact same thing and you’re telling me you can’t make it because he’s black? I realized I really had to make this movie.

MICHAEL PEÑA, actor (Daniel):  I think  Crash  may have seemed like an easier sell to people if it were written by, say, John Singleton. Then it’d be a “way of life” story. But because a white Canadian guy was doing it, people reacted differently to it. They were nervous. I’d grown up in a low-income area in Chicago. I think 80 to 90 percent of cops are good people, but the kind of stuff we see Matt Dillon’s character do in the movie did and still does happen where I come from.

CHRIS “LUDACRIS” BRIDGES, actor (Anthony):  When I read the script, I knew 100 percent it was something I wanted to be a part of. I had to audition at Paul’s house in front of him and Don. I was extremely nervous.

HAGGIS:  Thandie Newton was the second actor I sent it to, and she said yes. Others said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna do this,” and ran away. I also lost a lot of actors because it kept getting pushed. John Cusack wanted to play the Matt Dillon role, Heath Ledger was going play the Ryan Phillippe role; Forest Whitaker was actually locked in to play Terrence Howard’s role but dropped out. And Brendan Fraser was the last one cast, as the district attorney. He essentially green-lit the movie.

YARI:  When Heath left the movie, we dropped in foreign value a little bit, which brought the budget down to around $6.5 million. Many actors wouldn’t come on the film at all because they said, “It’s a first-time director.” But I stuck with Paul.

BRENDAN FRASER, actor (“Rick Cabot”):  I was in my mid-30s at the time. I asked Paul, “Are you sure that I’m the man to play the district attorney of Los Angeles?” He said, “You’re fine. I did my research. But I’ll be straight: I need you onboard because it’s going to complete the bonding with the picture.” I told him, “I’m worried I might come off as a little too Canadian.” See, he and I share that heritage. He said, “Oh, don’t worry, I can be a real asshole.” [ Laughs. ]

HAGGIS:  We decided to film in December 2003 — our Christmas card to Los Angeles. Race and intolerance, just in time for the holidays! [ Laughs. ] We shot in the winter because it actually did snow the first year I was in L.A. I remember thinking,  If it could snow here, anything is possible.

PEÑA:  I’d just finished my third episode of  NYPD Blue  playing a different gangster with a different name.  Crash  was my first meaningful real part after years of having a chip on my shoulder and thinking,  This Latino thing almost works against me.

HAGGIS:  We had enough money to shoot 32 days. The actors all agreed work for scale [which in 2003 for actors with smaller roles was around $6,000 a week; for featured performers, about $57,000 in total]. I told them, “You only have to be here for a week.” We doubled up on locations as well. For example, Matt Dillon’s character’s house was also Thandie Newton and Terrence Howard’s characters’ house. We made decisions like that over and over. It was the only way to make the schedule.

TERRENCE HOWARD, actor (Cameron Thayer):  Don and [co-star] Larenz Tate had recommended me for the part of Cameron after Forest dropped out. They were already a few weeks into production when I came onboard. My initial thought was:  This was a monster of an undertaking.

MORESCO:  The most any of the actors would ask us was, “Is it working? Can I go this far?” I constantly pushed them for deeper, stronger, and more real. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t run with it. We went home every night pretty confident we got what we needed for the day. Paul may have felt differently at times [ laughs ]. But I think we felt like we were shooting the movie we wanted to shoot, amidst all the problems.

HOWARD:  The scene where my wife [Thandie Newton] is molested by the cop was difficult. But trickier for me was when Tony Danza’s character tells me to make the character in our TV show “more black.” I remember Paul telling me how when he worked for a network, there were execs who told black jokes and his black colleagues had to just laugh along. He wondered what their lives were like and what it felt like to be ethnically neutered.

HAGGIS:  To be honest, I really didn’t know what I was doing most of the time. Bobby is always so positive and sweet. I’m the total opposite. I was like, “We’re never going make this.” I was brought to tears one day because everyone got sick with the flu and nothing was working.

SCHULMAN:  Did Paul mention that he literally had a heart attack on the last day of shooting the final scene in Chinatown? I’d never seen somebody turn a pale-greenish-whitish color, and he was complaining about his arm. And sure enough, he fell down on the ground, and we were lucky that we already had a helicopter on-set, because it brought him to Cedars. He had surgery, and five seconds later he was asking me, “How many people were in the intersection in the final scene? We needed a lot of people!” I told him we had plenty. He went crazy. “We’re going to have to reshoot the whole movie!” He had no idea what he was talking about. I’m like, “You’re high on morphine!

HAGGIS:  After my surgery, the doctor insisted I couldn’t go back to work for four months. I asked him how much stress he thought I would be experiencing sitting at home while another director was finishing my film. So we were back shooting a week and a half after my procedure with the understanding that I had to sit in my director’s chair at all times, and that my blood pressure had to be monitored every fifteen minutes. However, Don Cheadle had to leave to shoot  Hotel Rwanda,  so we couldn’t complete the film until he finished that. He came back two months later, we shot for a week, which included that extra insurance day we’d gotten when everyone got sick. And thank God we had extra time, because Bobby had time to write a new scene and add the character of Flanagan, the City Hall fixer played by William Fichtner.

SCHULMAN:  Brendan had to leave to go do a Broadway play, and he couldn’t get out of the contract, but we hadn’t finished shooting him yet!

HAGGIS:  We had shot 98 percent of Brendan’s scenes and couldn’t afford to get back into City Hall to shoot the end of one scene we had planned, so we had to rethink it, and we came up with the Flanagan character as a fix.

FRASER:  By then we had nicknamed the movie  Trainwreck.  [ Laughs .] We were selfish actors, everyone was griping. “Where is my paycheck?” I’ve learned since in my grizzled old age that stuff like this happens on every production.

PEÑA:  I definitely made less than 10,000 bucks. But I was so stoked just to have a role. Like,  Whoa, this is my dream.

YARI:  The movie was edited in our building, and I was thrilled with the first cut. Usually we have a lot of opinions and test the film, and those results may cause us to ask for certain changes. But this time, the first cut was phenomenal.

HAGGIS:  I saw it on the big screen for the first time at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2004. It was horrifying. I wanted to escape. The cast was there. I was sitting with Deborah. After it was over, I saw people were gasping and crying, and I’m going,  Who are these idiots?  All I saw were the mistakes. The spotlight hits me, and there is a thunderous ovation that goes on and on. I think,  Okay, it’s Toronto. They’re polite.  I dismissed all these people who wanted to shake my hand and tried to get out of there as quickly as possible . 

SCHULMAN:  My friends still say it’s the biggest standing ovation they’d ever seen at the festival. I was like,  Oh my God! We’re going sell this movie!  By that point, everybody involved was broke except for the actors. We  had  to make money.

TOM ORTENBERG, CEO, Open Road Films:  I was the president of theatrical films for Lionsgate at the time. All of us acquisition folks sit in clusters near our competitors. After the movie ends, all of us on the Lionsgate team look at each other like,  That was terrific.  Our competitors were totally dismissive and were talking about where they were going to get dinner. We were giddy about what we had just seen.

SCHULMAN:  Back then, a movie could sell within few hours of the premiere. But two hours later, it was still tumbleweeds. [Fox Networks Chairman and CEO] Peter Rice, one of my best friends, was running Fox Searchlight at the time and had invited me to their party — we couldn’t have our own because we were too broke — and I was a total mope. I said to him, “You haven’t told me what you think of the movie.” He said, “I love you so much, Cathy, but I have to say, I don’t think it will sell.” It was a gut punch. Then another distributor who shall remain nameless said, “It’s too much of a melodrama. It’s too predictable. It’s not realistic enough.” But we weren’t trying to be realistic. It’s a fable! My heart sank.

JON FELTHEIMER,   CEO, Lionsgate:  I’d had a deal with Paul at Sony, and he sent me the script for  Crash  fairly early on, when it was financed but had no distributor. During the festival, I got a call from everybody saying, “We saw it and love it.” And I said, “Well, get it!” It wasn’t a crazy expensive buy — $3 million — but we were aggressive about it.

ORTENBERG:  We closed the acquisition the day after the premiere. I told the filmmakers right away that we saw  Crash  as a commercial picture and an awards contender. This was September of 2004, so they asked if we could do an end-of-year release for that season. I said, “It’s a terrific movie, but it’s not an obvious awards contender. It’s a word-of-mouth-movie. There’s a lot of work to be done.” So we decided to release it the following spring. Movies like  The Silence of the Lambs,   Gladiator,  and  Braveheart  had all come out in the first half of the year and done just fine at the Oscars.

HAGGIS:  I told Tom, “You’re out of your mind.” Historically, the Academy was more comfortable with films that deal with race in ways that were history-based, like, “We used to be like this, we take it very seriously, and we’re very sorry.” Race and intolerance were simply not  popular subjects  at the Oscars.

FELTHEIMER:  Paul and the producers thought we should “platform” the movie — open in New York and L.A. on maybe eight screens and then expand over a few weeks. But we felt  Crash could work as a wide release, and it did: We opened on May 6, 2005, in 1,864 theaters. It earned $9 million over opening weekend and ended up doing a total of $55 million domestically, with a global total of over $98 million.

SCHULMAN:  One thing I will forever love Lionsgate for doing is that they agreed to test in five different markets outside of urban markets. Art house, everything. And those are expensive and very hard to do well. But they did it and the movie got excellent marks. And that’s why they decided to go wide with it.

HAGGIS:  I just was thrilled that people were going to see our little movie. And thankfully it  was  a wide release, because we got scathingly bad reviews in  The New York Times   and  The Los Angeles Times .  If those were our only cities, they’d have killed us before we even began. Also, I remember reading something in  The Hollywood Reporter  that said, and I’m paraphrasing: “If this film had been made ten years ago, we would’ve called it brave or cutting-edge. But we don’t have these problems anymore.”  What?  I didn’t necessarily think the movie would be a critical success; but the fact that people were affected by it, and Roger Ebert and a lot of the other important critics loved it nationwide, is what saved the film.

FELTHEIMER:  As Paul says, reviews out of New York and L.A. were not spectacular, so if we  had  platformed the movie, we would have had a very hard road after that. Unfortunately — or fortunately — this business is not an exact science.

HAGGIS:  In July 2005, Jon and the Lionsgate team tell us, “We’re officially going for an Oscar campaign.” I said, “That’s great. The actors did terrific work and deserve recognition.” They said, “We’re also going for Best Picture.” I told Jon, “Please don’t. Just let this be a little picture. My friends are going to laugh at me!”

STACEY MOORADIAN, awards consultant:  I was senior vice-president of publicity for Lionsgate at the time. Our early-May release gave us the ability to run a home-entertainment campaign in the fall as a push into the awards-season window.

ORTENBERG:  The DVD came out in September, so we instantly had a new audience. By the time the other award contenders came out in the fall, we noticed many of them were not quite hitting the mark. Voters said they liked one film and respected another film, but what they loved more than anything else was  Crash .

SCHULMAN:  We’d also gotten the film to Oprah [Winfrey]. That’s when everything changed. She had the cast on her show that October and officially put her seal of approval on it.

ORTENBERG:  Oprah had had what she  called  her “ Crash  moment” at the Hermès store in Paris [when, Winfrey said, a clerk mistreated her because of her race]. We’d become part of the pop-culture vernacular!

HOWARD:  It was a busy time for me, because  Hustle & Flow  was in the Oscar race the same year. Lionsgate talked about doing a Supporting Actor push for my  Crash  role, too, but they thought it’d get in the way of my lead campaign for  Hustle.  So they decided against it — and I later ended up with a nomination for  Hustle.

ORTENBERG:  The day we got the Best Ensemble nomination from the Screen Actors Guild in early January was a turning point. So we decided to send  Crash  DVDs to everybody in the guild. Our consumer DVD was already out, so we didn’t have to really worry about piracy. It was a no-brainer. Why  wouldn’t  we do this? Apparently no one had done this before! The total cost to ship 100,000-plus DVDs in paper sleeves was around $225,000. At the time, a For Your Consideration [FYC] billboard on Sunset Boulevard cost about $50,000 per month, and a one-page FYC ad in  Variety  would be about $25,000, not to mention millions spent on local TV, radio, and newspaper ads. So $225,000 was a good investment out of our overall budget for the season, which was $5 million, which felt like a lot less than that of our competitors.

HAGGIS:  The decision to send the DVDs to SAG turned out to be brilliant. There are a lot of people in SAG! I’d never believed in those big “For Your Consideration” ads anyway. It’s all so ridiculous.

MORESCO:  With each awards ceremony, we started to win best original screenplay. But anytime it entered into my mind that we could win an Oscar, I pushed it out.

HAGGIS:  Then, we get six Oscar nominations! It was surreal.  Wow, I’m an Oscar nominee.  It was  Crash, Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Munich,  and  Good Night, and Good Luck . And we finally got one tiny little billboard, on Sunset. I was so proud.

ORTENBERG:  We could tell pretty quickly it was going be  Crash  versus  Brokeback. Then  Brokeback  started winning most of the critics’ awards, and, by the way, we hadn’t gotten a Best Picture nomination at the Globes.

HAGGIS:  It’s true, the Globes have always hated my work. [ Laughs. ]

MOORADIAN:  The Globes were all over the place that year —  The Constant Gardener and  A History of Violence  were nominated over us for Best Drama — so it was unclear how strong a precursor they’d be for the Oscars as compared to previous years

ORTENBERG:  So we knew we needed a breakthrough moment. Then we won the SAG award for Best Ensemble. That’s when a lot of people said the race turned in our favor. It proved that  Brokeback  wasn’t invincible.

LISA TABACK, awards consultant ( Spotlight ,  La La Land ):  That year, I was working on  Good Night, and Good Luck.  It was a film that if you loved it, you really loved it — writers and directors in particular.  Crash,  however,   appealed to actors, who represent the biggest branch in the academy. It’s also a very West Coast film, and voters are based there more than anywhere else. The issue of “getting along” post–Rodney King had been an issue in L.A. for many years. The film talked about race, and not just in terms of black and white; a lot of different ethnic groups are represented in the film in a way they weren’t in others. And that really resonated with people.

HAGGIS:  After a while, I started to feel very uncomfortable with all the attention. So I took off to Europe for three weeks to research and write  In the Valley of Elah . I come back and people are telling me, “You know,  Crash  actually has a real shot at winning.”

SCHULMAN:  The day before the Oscars, my publicist tells me, “The Vegas odds just went your way.” I was like, “Everyone’s telling me different shit.” I’d just heard the trend was going more toward  Brokeback ! He said, “You have to prepare a speech.”

MORESCO:  So we win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, Paul gives a lovely speech, and it’s my time at the microphone. And they cut to a commercial. The only thing I had really cared about was thanking my parents, my wife, and my friends from the old neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen. But I never got the chance. The win was really bittersweet for me.

SCHULMAN:  Then our editor, Hughes Winborne, won. Someone told me that whoever wins the editing Oscar is also a reliable indicator for Best Picture.

HAGGIS:  It’s the end of the show and I’m sitting across from the  Brokeback  producers.   I turn to face them so I could applaud and not be caught looking like an asshole on camera. I’m all ready to clap for Ang Lee, and I hear Jack Nicholson say, “And the Oscar goes to …  Crash. ” I felt someone stand up behind me, and it’s my wife. I was so confused. “She loved  Brokeback Mountain  that much?” And then I realized, “ Oh my God, we won.”  I had no speech, so thank God Cathy had prepared. The room was thunderous.

SCHULMAN:  Before we left the house that morning I told my husband, “There’s an open document on my computer. Can you print it and grab it?” What was actually open on my computer was not my speech but a list of statistics about genocide in Darfur. At the time I was working on my next movie,  Darfur Now.  That’s what I had with me that night. ( Laughs )

PEÑA:  I actually wasn’t invited to the show. Everyone else in the cast were all big stars. I was nobody [ laughs ]. So instead I watched it at a viewing party on La Cienega. My agency at the time had set it up for me to attend, but at the door they wouldn’t let me in. “Sorry, man.” I’m like “No, I’m in  Crash . I swear!” Finally they let me in. I got a drink and sat by myself. When we won, I screamed like when the Bears won the Super Bowl in ’86. I was the only one cheering, and people were staring at me. They just went back drinking their drinks.

FRASER:  I was in Mexico City that night working on a movie with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Andy Garcia. Sarah had her Blackberry and tells me, “Fraser,  Crash  just won Best Picture.” Suddenly she called over these mariachi players; people were honking horns and shouting, “That’s Brendan, he’s in that movie  Crash,  it just won Best Picture!” It was like a scene from  It’s a Wonderful Life.  [ Laughs. ]

MORESCO:  Later in the night, Paul says, “Come on, Bobby, smile! We just won the fucking Best Picture Oscar.” And I couldn’t. But I’m not angry anymore. The next day about 40 of us went to Palm Springs and spend a weekend together with the Oscar. It all turned out fine.

SCHULMAN:  The craziest part was walking into the  Vanity Fair  party. Mick Jagger hugged me. Everyone knew my face. I still think of that room as being filled with caricature drawings. They were handing out In-N-Out Burgers, so it was essentially every famous person I’ve ever seen in one room eating burgers. The next morning when I had to return my jewelry, like Cinderella, I ran into a girl who said, “Did you see that woman who won Best Picture last night?” And I said, “That was me!”

HAGGIS:  A few days after the Oscars, [author] Annie Proulx wrote a piece in  The Guardian  newspaper complaining about  Brokeback  not winning Best Picture.  Million Dollar Baby  had won every single award the previous year  except  my category, Best Adapted Screenplay, and you didn’t see me trashing  Sideways.  I thought it was all in quite poor taste. And then the theory came out that the Academy was homophobic and that’s why  Brokeback  didn’t win. It was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. There were two films that year,  Brokeback  and  Capote,  that had gay protagonists. How could they even get nominated if voters hated gay people? [ Editor’s note: Proulx’s rep sent along this statement: “Annie won’t be able to talk to you, but all I can say is that  Crash  might have won the Academy Award but  Brokeback Mountain  is the film that has endured. ”]

TABACK:  Voters are more private when they are supporting a movie that wasn’t as well-reviewed. If critics say something is great, we also like to say it’s great. That’s human nature. But in the privacy of your own home, you can really take in and vote on a film that resonates with  you . Also, voters like to support an underdog, and that’s what  Crash  was. It passed the “smell test” in terms of its being a contemporary awards film. It wasn’t a period piece; it didn’t take place in a far-off land. So while it may not have been a fine piece of art to some, it certainly resonated with people. And it still holds up.

SCHULMAN:  I know people were angry about us winning. But I am one of only a few women to win Best Picture who wasn’t married to or related to the director. Also, it was an outsider movie that didn’t have a frame of it touched by a studio. Also I think one of the only other Best Picture winners that was like that was  Chariots of Fire,  and that’s very cool.

ORTENBERG:  I got about 90 percent support from my peers. And the backlash I felt I quickly and easily chalked up to sour grapes. The ones who make excuses aren’t the ones who win.

FELTHEIMER:  We’d won Oscars before  Crash.  Seeing Halle Berry win Best Actress for  Monster’s Ball  was very exciting. Also, we own Summit now, so we have two Best Picture wins including  The Hurt Locker  and  Crash.  And this year we have  La La Land.  I wouldn’t mind a three-peat. [ Laughs. ]

MORESCO:  I immediately got more offers than ever after winning. You definitely worry less. And by the way, it turns out that Paul and I were both right:  Crash  was a movie  and a television show. It became a drama on Starz in 2008 starring Dennis Hopper.

HAGGIS:  I said no to many big projects after the Oscars. Big, big, big, big ones that I should’ve said yes to, but I’m an idiot. I won’t tell you which ones. [ Laughs .] I  was thrilled to get hired to write  Casino Royale  a couple years later — I like doing things that people don’t expect me to do — but I fail so much more often than I succeed. I’ve got several screenplays sitting in the drawer that just aren’t good enough. It’s always hard. Always. Also, to this day I can’t watch anything I’ve written or directed after it’s done. Even  Million Dollar Baby.  I think Clint [Eastwood] did a great job, and I know it’s good! But I just can’t watch it.

BRIDGES:  So much of what we dealt with in  Crash  as a culture we are dealing with today. I’ve even heard of schools showing it to their students, and that’s very powerful. It’s what I got into acting to do. To make people think. We need to be uncomfortable. I think the film also set a precedent for a lot of films and shows we’ve seen since that feature a mix of races and ethnicities in their casts. The diverse cast of the  Fast and Furious  movies that I’ve been a part of maybe wouldn’t exist without  Crash.  It taught Hollywood that audiences of color don’t only want to see one thing. People, no matter who they are, want to see real-life situations that they can relate to.

PENA:  I thought that my career would be years and years of recycling gangster characters. Then  Crash  wins Best Picture and someone like Oliver Stone wants me to play Will Jimeno in  World Trade Center.  The guy who made  Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon,  and  Wall Street  wanted to meet  me .

YARI:  Then I had to go through being sued. [ Editor’s note: In 2011, a Los Angeles judge ruled that Yari was in breach of contract and owed about $12 million to Haggis, Moresco, and Fraser for failing to pay them profits. Yari had also been denied a producer credit on the movie by the Producers Guild of America, which resulted in his not making the cut as one of the winners of the movie’s Best Picture Oscar. ] That was my thanks for making Paul’s movie when everyone turned it down. It was very unpopular of me to have gone after the board members of the Academy producers’ division, which ruled that the PGA ultimately could determine who the Oscar went to. It was very kiss-the-ring kind of stuff. But I wasn’t going after the Academy’s membership; I was going after the people running it to force them to behave properly.

MORESCO:  In the end, were we better than those other movies? No. Did we win the Oscar? Yeah. So what? Nobody wanted to make  Crash.  Nobody wanted to make  Million Dollar Baby.  Paul and I sat in his little office together every day, and we’d come up with these stories that we felt we loved and hopefully somebody else would love. And we stuck with it. I hope others take a lesson from all that. You just have to not give up. Nobody can stop you from writing, directing, or producing. Nobody. They can only stop you from getting paid. [ Laughs. ]

HAGGIS:  I’m still very proud of the movie, but people are always asking me, “Do you think it should have won Best Picture?” What the hell am I supposed to say? “Yes. I think it’s the best picture of all time! Thank you for asking!” All I can say is that I’m terribly honored to be among those other nominees. I mean, look at those other films —  Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote, Munich —  they’re all fucking great movies. And I’m so glad everyone at Lionsgate ignored me about not campaigning for  Crash,  because I have two Oscars sitting at home.

*A version of this article appears in the November 28, 2016, issue of  New York  Magazine.

• best picture
• paul haggis
• bobby moresco
• terrence howard
• oral history
• vulture cover story
• new york magazine

Is Crash Truly the Worst Best Picture?

The high moral drama of the 2006 oscar winner is still infuriating, but also completely watchable..

When you strip away all the surrounding clatter that’s now attached to Crash —the legend of its surprise 2006 Best Picture win, the vicious backlash against its victory—and watch the movie today, what remains striking about this ensemble drama is just how confidently made it is. A filmmaker fully in control of the story he’s telling, Paul Haggis (who also co-wrote the screenplay) wasn’t just tackling racism: He was showing how divisions of all kinds—whether because of age, gender, economic status, or the specific section of Los Angeles where you live—create imperceptible but significant fissures between people. Meticulously crafted and anchored by a superb cast that imbues the film with feeling, Crash is as compulsively watchable now as it was when it was released a decade ago. Also still true: It’s an infuriating, awful movie.

As with plenty of Oscar winners, Crash ’s backstory is now almost as well known as the film’s plot. Most have heard that Haggis, an Emmy-winning television writer who worked on shows as diverse as The Facts of Life and thirtysomething , got carjacked in 1991 after going to a screening of The Silence of the Lambs . Holding onto that traumatic experience for years, he woke up in the middle of the night shortly after 9/11, motivated to hit the keyboard and bang out some initial ideas for what would become Crash , a film that follows the exploits of a disparate cross-section of Angelenos over the course of about 24 hours.  

In many ways, Crash ’s making and its eventual Oscar triumph are an inspiring, unicorn-rare exception to how Hollywood and awards season normally work. Financed independently and shot on a relatively shoestring budget of about $7 million, the project came together because actor Don Cheadle, who signed on as a producer, and his fellow cast members agreed to defer their usual fees, an indication of how passionately those involved felt about the script. Facing off against higher-profile names like George Clooney ( Good Night, and Good Luck ) and Steven Spielberg ( Munich ) for Best Picture—not to mention the critically beloved Ang Lee romantic drama Brokeback Mountain — Crash pulled off the upset. This was a true underdog indie film put out by the then-tiny distributor Lionsgate (long before the company got into the Hunger Games business) that managed to claim the industry’s top prize.

And yet Crash remains one of the most derided Best Picture winners, its name practically emblematic of the Academy’s penchant for wrongheaded choices. Despite generally positive reviews upon release, it’s been called the “ worst movie of the decade ” and the worst Best Picture winner ever. Viewed ten years later, all that vilification isn’t entirely fair. In the age of #OscarsSoWhite, give Crash credit for being one of the few recent Oscar champs to make characters of color not just supporting players but central figures in its drama. And then lament that Haggis’s faith in his earnest, melodramatic material belies how misguided the entire project is.

Moving between Brentwood, Downtown and the Valley, Crash lays out what appear to be separate storylines until it becomes clear how these characters are connected in our tidy little moral drama. Cheadle’s emotionally closed-off cop is actually the older brother of Larenz Tate’s carjacking brother, who unsuspectingly takes a fateful ride with Ryan Phillippe’s honorable rookie cop, who used to be partnered with Matt Dillon’s bigoted policeman, who ends up rescuing Thandie Newton’s resentful wife from a burning car after he’d earlier groped her during a traffic stop. Insisting that we’re all invisibly linked to one another, Crash makes its case by stacking the deck so that nobody in the movie is just some ordinary, average schlub living his life: It’s not a small world but, rather, a rigged one masterminded by Haggis.  

At a moment when race relations and police brutality remain at the forefront of the national conversation, Crash should be as timely as ever. It isn’t. Watching the film now, its depiction of why we can’t all just get along appears maddeningly untethered to the ways Americans actually experience (and, sometimes, help perpetuate) distrust and prejudice. Haggis, who had written the previous year’s Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby , never claimed to solve racism with Crash , but his movie did something almost as offensive: reduced a societal ill to a narrative device, the grist for convoluted dramatic ironies that could be held up to the audience as cutesy indicators of the crazy randomness of modern life in a big city.

Crash is the sort of movie that, after establishing that Phillippe’s good-guy cop recognizes his partner’s racism, will be sure to balance the cosmic scales later, having him murder Tate’s unarmed character after a tragic misunderstanding just to prove the filmmaker’s thesis that, hey, everybody’s a little bit racist. Haggis has characters hurl nasty epithets at one another, as if that’s the most corrosive aspect of discrimination, failing to acknowledge that what’s most destructive aren’t the shouts but, rather, the whispers—the private jokes and long-held prejudices shared by likeminded people behind closed doors and far from public view. Even though I agree with Haggis that we all contain trace elements of intolerance that even we don’t recognize, Crash never dares to contend with racism’s evil, infectious power—instead, it makes its characters’ regrettable actions so uncomplicated that we don’t see our own similar failings up there on the screen. Despite Haggis’s endless attempts to interweave the lives of his seemingly dissimilar individuals, he never bothers to include the audience in his calculus, allowing viewers to stand outside the drama in order to judge it from a safe perspective. The whole world’s terrible, but thank god us fortunate few in the theater are wise enough to know better.

All the anger directed at Crash , perversely, is a reflection of the film’s assured execution. A movie this exasperating could only have been made by true believers, and you see it not only in Haggis’s elaborate, jigsaw-puzzle narrative design but in the mostly fine cast he’s assembled. For every questionable choice—say, tapping eternal lightweight Brendan Fraser to play the city’s district attorney—there’s a discovery of a new talent, like Michael Peña, who shines in an underdeveloped role as a locksmith. Even characters stuck as shards of dull glass in Haggis’s overall mosaic are redeemed by the performances Cheadle, Dillon, and others bring to them. (And it’s illuminating to see Sandra Bullock, trying to create empathy for her shrewish Westside wife, begin to lay the foundation for the dramatic performances that would later lead to her Oscar for The Blind Side .)

Haggis’s actors are so committed that they draw you into the movie’s simplistic spell—they make Crash just compelling enough for its gimmicks to fully enrage you. And what gimmicks they are. Ten years after its Oscar triumph, Crash still contains two of the most unabashedly operatic scenes I’ve ever seen—Dillon’s rescue of Newton from that burning car, and the slow-motion gunpoint showdown between Peña and a Persian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub)—and while both remain risible, Haggis’s investment in their grandiose, ludicrous poetry is something to see. A more moderate, reasonable filmmaker would have had the good sense to ease up on the throttle, but Haggis’s certainty steamrolls over any consideration of half measures.

That conviction must have been part of the reason Crash won Best Picture ten years ago. Academy voters are just like the rest of us: They know we live in a very complex world rife with problems that seem intractable, and sometimes we’d like just a smidgeon of assurance that we’re not all careening off the edge of a cliff. Into that void stepped Crash , a confident drama that didn’t offer to cure racism but at least promised to neutralize it for two hours through the merits of passionate acting and clever filmmaking. But Crash ’s crippling limitations end up serving as a warning against passion, cleverness, and confidence. If not properly monitored, they’re all just forms of self-delusion, the very same quality that allows bigotry and ignorance to flourish. The older I get, the more I prefer not being sure of anything. 

For more on the Academy Awards, listen to the latest episode of the  Grierson & Leitch  podcast:

Grierson & Leitch write about the movies regularly for the  New Republic  and host a podcast on film,  Grierson & Leitch . Follow them on Twitter  @griersonleitch  or visit their site  griersonleitch.com .

Tim Grierson is the senior U.S. critic for  Screen International , chief film critic for  Paste  and a contributing editor at Backstage and MEL.

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• DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Don Cheadle as Graham; Matt Dillon as Officer Ryan; Sandra Bullock as Jean; Jennifer Esposito as Ria; William Fichtner as Flanagan; Brendan Fraser as Rick; Michael Peña as Daniel; Terrence Dashon Howard as Cameron; Ludacris as Anthony; Thandie Newton as Christine; Ryan Phillippe as Officer Hanson; Larenz Tate as Peter

Home Release Date

• Paul Haggis

Distributor

Movie review.

In L.A., nobody touches anybody else anymore. So begins a story that is certain to touch moviegoers in a way they’re not used to being touched. With the ethnically diverse yet deeply divided Los Angeles as its setting, Crash tackles the sensitive subject of racism head-on by intertwining the stories of a litany of people from both sides of the proverbial tracks.

Graham is a police detective. Jean is a district attorney’s wife. Officer Ryan is a veteran cop; Hanson is his rookie partner. Daniel is a locksmith. Flanagan is a television director, and Christine is his wife. Character after character is introduced … many of whom will intersect—and crash into each other—at some point in a 36-hour period. But while we quickly learn what these people do , what’s more important in this movie is who they are —or more specifically, what race they are. Because in Crash , race is everything .

Positive Elements

As a character-driven story, Crash adeptly explores multifaceted individuals—people who are simultaneously heroes and villains, courageous and spineless. Virtually every individual highlighted has both redeeming and contemptible moments. The white Officer Ryan, for example, is overtly racist, and he breaks the law while on duty. It’s easy to despise him. Yet in several scenes we see another side of this tragic, misguided character as he expresses compassion for his cancer-stricken father. And we also witness him risking his life to save a black woman.

Officer Hanson rounds out the good-cop, bad-cop part of the story by repeatedly trying to help people. He sticks up for Flanagan in a tense standoff with police, keeping the frazzled director from getting shot. He later picks up a stranger in need.

Elsewhere, a carjacker frees a group of enslaved immigrants. Jean realizes how valuable her relationship with her oft-abused housekeeper really is. And Daniel gently—and creatively—teaches his 5-year-old daughter that she can face the world without fear. There is an abundance of positive “walk-away” value in this film as it relates to race relations (but it’s complicated and sometimes obscured by other content; I’ll explore that more in the “Conclusion”).

Spiritual Elements

A carjacker insists on placing a figurine of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, on the dashboard of any car he’s riding in, which prompts his partner to ask if he’s heard from God lately. (His pal also refers to the statue as “that voodoo thing.”) A father comforts his young daughter by telling her a story about a fairy coming to visit him. The girl is later described by another man as an “angel who came to protect me.” It’s mentioned that Flanagan is Buddhist. Set during Christmastime, the movie shows a couple of nativity scenes.

Sexual & romantic Content

Before Graham and his female companion are interrupted during sex, we hear their moans, and we’re exposed to a full-body shot of the two in a sexual position. (Her bare breasts get screen time, as does his backside.) After getting out of bed, she makes a crude joke about masturbation. And he speaks bluntly of the incident to his mother on the phone.

In a disturbing and drawn-out scenario, Officer Ryan stops Flanagan and Christine in their SUV, asks them to step out of the vehicle and then proceeds to fondle Christine (even running his hands up under her dress) in front of her detained husband. As the camera zooms in, the officer makes several crude remarks about the wife giving her husband oral sex. Christine lets fly more than a few obscene words, too. The scene is verbally rehashed later by Flanagan and Christine, with Christine using the f-word and other vulgar terms to chastise her husband for not intervening.

A large painting of an artistically rendered, fully naked woman hangs in the background of one scene.

Violent Content

Two carjackers run over a man. Though the impact isn’t shown, we hear its sound, and then the victim groaning. The offending pair carry on a lengthy discussion about whether they should leave the man under their truck, or pull him out. (They pull him out and drop him off—literally—at a hospital. Before it’s all over, the camera gets a pretty good look at his grisly wounds.

Guns appear in what seems like every other scene, though few are fired. We do see, however, a boy getting shot from close range; blood drips from his mouth. Several people are held at gunpoint, including one incident involving a child, who is shot at.

Fire engulfs an overturned vehicle while its driver and her rescuer are still trapped inside. A woman at the scene is shown with blood on her head. Flanagan fights with a carjacker while another crook threatens to shoot him. A Persian shopkeeper’s store gets trashed, and racist graffiti is written on the walls (it’s illegible for movie viewers). Jean falls down a flight of stairs.

Crude or Profane Language

Like the rapid-fire shots of a drive-by, the f-word is sprayed about 100 times (several times it’s used with “mother”; it’s also used in a sexual manner). The s-word is said at least a dozen times, while God’s name is misused almost as frequently and is often combined with “d–n.” Christ’s name gets abused four times. More than 30 other milder profanities further mar this film, including several sexual slang terms.

Crash includes many racial epithets. Whites, blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Arabs, Koreans … no one gets left out on this parade of racially offensive language. The movie attempts to make a point about how frequently we differentiate others based solely on racial descriptions, as when two black carjackers argue about calling each other “n-ggers.” Or when Persians are called Arab “terrorists.” Or when a Latina has to explain to the man she’s sleeping with the difference between Mexicans and South Americans.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Several people smoke cigarettes, including Graham, who says twice that he’s trying to quit. It’s insinuated that a detective was involved in a drug ring. Graham says the man was “coked up out his head” when he was shot dead. Christine is intoxicated during a night full of confrontations.

Other noteworthy Elements

As stated earlier, Crash excels at delving into the lives of exceedingly complex, and many times morally confused characters. This is a story in which good guys make more bad decisions than bad guys and bad guys sometimes outshine the good. Also, justice is rarely served. Two murderers walk away free while expressing no remorse. Given the chance to stand up for what’s right, Graham (one of the good guys) decides to stay quiet and allows a potentially innocent man to be cast off as a repeat offender.

Officer Ryan embodies everything a cop shouldn’t be. After 17 years on the force, he’s become renown for using his authority to intimidate and mishandle blacks—and yet he continues to get away with it. Graham lies. The Persian shop owner seeks lethal revenge. Jean directs her rage at everyone within reach.

In his motion picture directorial debut, Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for the controversial Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby ) is wasting no time in stirring up the waters. Crash is a riveting, provocative and well-executed movie. Its actors put in first-class performances. Its photography is seamless. And despite the barrage of tragic characters and situations, it retains an odd sense of beauty. But it’s obvious that Haggis’ intent was not just for people to revere his artistry. Crash is as much about what’s off the screen than what’s on it. The movie’s gritty —and I can’t put too much emphasis on that word—take on urban racism is sure to stir up plenty of discussion. So, let’s talk. …

I grew up a minority in about as ethnically diverse a city as they come—Hong Kong. To give you an indication of how blended the society was, my elementary and high schools included students from more than 40 nationalities. I can’t recall a single time in which I was surrounded entirely by a group of people who looked like me. Diversity was simply a given in life.

But even in such a hodgepodge setting, racism existed. There was always someone “lower” on the totem pole, no matter who you were—someone who mustered up feelings of fear, aggression, protectiveness, intrigue, pity, compassion … the list is endless as to how we respond to our own racial prejudices. Sure, many of us have been taught to not stereotype others, yet it’s obvious that in this nation—and in many others as well—we still have more than just a few inches to go.

Haggis would argue we have miles to go. Based on his characters in Crash , we are a people utterly incapable of seeing anyone without stereotypical filters. Race colors our every decision. By focusing so exclusively on people who are each racist in some regard, the director creates a powder keg society that’s oversaturated in racial hyper-sensitivity.

In fact, if everyone in the real L.A. thought and acted like its onscreen denizens do, the City of Angels would’ve been blown sky-high a long time ago. So clearly, Haggis is sensationalizing racism for the sake of making a point. What that point is, though, is open to a great deal of interpretation.

One critic, Josh Bell from the Las Vegas Weekly , writes that “by attempting to say everything about race, Haggis ultimately says nothing.” I don’t believe Crash says nothing . As I left the theater and saw the assortment of people walking, standing, living around me, I was more aware of my own preconceived notions of others. But I was also aware of the ultra-thick layer of grimy material I had just waded through to be reminded of this simple notion: We’re all different; we’re all the same; and we all need each other. At the risk of sounding trite, I could’ve watched Sesame Street to tell me that.

Marcus Yoars

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Crash (United States/Germany, 2004)

Ensemble features can be daunting, yet some filmmakers embrace the challenge, and their results reward an audience. A lot of characters are woven into the tapestry of Crash , the feature directing debut of TV veteran Paul Haggis. (Haggis was also Oscar nominated for writing the screenplay of Million Dollar Baby .) The story unfolds in Los Angeles, where hostility is often a barrier to intimacy, and hatred and fear cloud judgment. Don Cheadle plays Graham Waters, a police detective investigating what may be a racially-motivated killing. Graham is having an affair with his Latina partner (Jennifer Esposito), whom he variously refers to as "a white woman" and "Mexican," neither of which is accurate. Matt Dillon is LAPD officer Jack Ryan, a 17 year veteran of the force whose actions often cross the line. When he fondles a woman (Thandie Newton) during a routine traffic stop, his partner (Ryan Phillippe) wants to sever their professional relationship. Meanwhile, the D.A., Rick Cameron (Brendan Fraser), and his wife, Jean (Sandra Bullock), become crime victims when their car is stolen by a pair of thieves (Chris "Ludicris" Bridges and Larenz Tate).

The best ensemble films are the ones in which the characters are given an opportunity to breathe ( Magnolia , Short Cuts , and Nashville come to mind). With Crash , 105 minutes is barely enough time to let the numerous participants begin to inhale. The movie runs for long enough to allow Haggis to present the story, but we're left wanting a little more - a few extra scenes and an added conversation or two (especially between Newton's character and her husband, played by Terrence Dashon Howard). But I suppose it's always best to leave an audience hungry, rather than feeling overstuffed.

Crash 's strength is that it deals intelligently with serious subjects. Racism is a hot-button issue, yet Haggis manages to approach it in a universal, reasonable manner. We don't feel like we're being preached to, nor does this seem like a sanctimonious "message movie." The film's numerous stories are tied together by a web of coincidence. Af first, there's a sense that so much contrivance invites criticism. However, on a second viewing, I was aware of the balance and symmetry in the way the characters' tales connect, sometimes only tangentially. Haggis has created a microcosmos, so it's only right for plot-lines to criss-cross.

The director has assembled a large, accomplished cast that includes Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton, and Ryan Phillippe. Amongst other things, this group virtually assures that the film will be seen. All are more than competent in their roles - with Cheadle, Dillon, and Newton being especially memorable - and each does his or her best to enhance the two-dimensionality of the characters as they are presented in the screenplay. The most powerful scene in Crash has Dillon and Newton confronting mistrust on the cusp of mortality.

The principle subject matter is racism and its manifestations, and how it is often as much the result of social conditioning and anger as of hatred and intolerance. In addition to the usual white-on-black manifestation of discrimination, we are confronted with black-on-Latino, Latino-on-Asian, white-on-Middle Eastern, and other permutations. Wherever cultural differences exist, there is room for tension. However, by depicting bigoted characters as otherwise caring individuals, Crash asks us to consider the causes of racism as much as to examine its effects. In doing this, Crash sets itself apart, at least to a degree, from other, similar motion pictures. Although an expanded running time would have afforded us the opportunity to get to know the characters better, Crash is long enough to permit the film's themes to strike a responsive chord.

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Why David Cronenberg’s Crash Is So Controversial

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David Cronenberg earned the nickname “The Master of Body Horror” after an incredible run of flesh-curling horror classics, culminating with the massive success of The Fly (1986). The Canadian writer-director then spent decades severing himself from his fleshy horror movie roots in favor of psychological dramas.

His first noteworthy departure was Dead Ringers (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons in two leading roles as a pair of eerily identical twin gynecologists. As psychological as his films would become, Cronenberg often kept one foot in his body horror origins. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his adaptation of a book that even he described as "impossible" to adapt: William S. Burroughs’ widely banned, surrealist 1959 novel Naked Lunch . Despite his 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch inevitably bombing at the box office, Cronenberg doubled down on his personal quest to bring challenging literary works to the screen that Hollywood was too afraid to touch with J.G. Ballard’s controversial 1973 novel Crash .

Incidentally, Cronenberg’s Crash is not to be confused with Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning film Crash (2004) which features an ensemble cast of characters who collide at the intersection of racial tensions in Los Angeles at a time when the Rodney King Riots were still in the rearview mirror. Like Ballard’s source novel, Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) concerns a TV director who, after surviving a car accident, falls in with a perverse group of people who fetishize automobile collisions and practically worship those which involve fatalities. While that synopsis might have already answered this question, it’s still worth asking: why is Cronenberg’s Crash so controversial?

Why Is Cronenberg’s Crash So Controversial?

The reason why Cronenberg’s Crash is so controversial is fairly straightforward: it’s riddled with sex and violence. The film is so lurid and provocative that Cronenberg recut it in the hopes of receiving an R-rating in the United States after its

"numerous explicit sex scenes" got the film slapped with an NC-17, the MPAA's kiss of death. That attempt failed miserably. Crash was marketed as an erotic thriller. But throughout the film, Cronenberg rides the line between eroticism and blatant pornography, all under the umbrella of a macabre subject matter that is insensitive to one of the leading causes of death in the United States which "kills over 100 people every day" according to the CDC.

It’s not simply that the characters within Cronenberg’s film get their rocks off to car crash fatalities. It’s that the film itself fetishes them too, with cinematographer Peter Suschitzky’s steamy shots of corpses hanging over shattered windshields and bleeding out on the side of the highway set to an eerie, guitar-centric score by The Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore. Was Cronenberg really surprised that Crash would offend audiences in light of the fact that 42,065 Americans died in motor vehicle collisions in the year that the film was released? Even in Canada, where Crash was filmed, motor vehicle fatalities have been one of the leading causes of death for decades, though the data is not quite as staggering as in the States.

Related: The Fly: Every Movie in the Franchise, Ranked

Imagine if Adam McKay or the Safdie Brothers remade Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) but updated its setting in the New York elite orgy circuit to take place during the peak of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Picture the backlash on Twitter to a film like that, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of why some people were offended in the '90s by Crash .

Francis Ford Coppola Allegedly Tried to Sabotage Crash at Cannes

One of those people who were (allegedly) offended by Crash just so happened to be Francis Ford Coppola who just so happened to be serving as jury president at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival where Crash premiered. According to Cronenberg, Coppola tried to prevent Crash from receiving Cannes’ coveted Palme d’Or which was awarded instead to Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996). Cronenberg claims that the jury outmaneuvered Coppola by giving Crash a Special Jury Award, a prize that is not awarded every year. Speaking to IndieWire in 2020, Cronenberg said this.

"Coppola was totally against it. I think he was the primary one. When I’m asked why [ Crash ] got this Special Jury Award, well, I think it was the jury’s attempt to get around the Coppola negativity, because they had the power to create their own award without the president [Coppola]’s approval."

Coppola has not spoken publicly about Cronenberg’s film since 1996. But at the French ceremony, the director of The Godfather films commented that some jury members "did abstain very passionately" to Crash . Apparently, there were also members of the audience at Cannes who shared this sentiment, as The New York Times reported that loud booing accompanied Cronenberg as he approached the stage to accept his award.

Roger Ebert Called Crash's Erotic Content Into Question

While a handful of critics were offended by Crash , there were others who admired the film like Roger Ebert who gave Cronenberg high marks. However, Ebert did call into question the existence of its controversial subject matter in the real world in his review of Crash .

"Now of course there is no connection between eroticism and automobile accidents... Crash is about characters entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has."

Ebert’s review was published in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997 when Crash hit theaters in the United States. This was back when the internet had barely emerged from its protozoic dial-up stage as a hub for obscure chat forums. Given the rise of fetish-based groups that have festered on the internet in recent years, Ebert’s amusing comment that no one actually has a "thing" for car crashes may no longer be such a safe assumption.

The Novel Contained a Controversial Subplot That Cronenberg Cut From Crash

The polarizing reaction Cronenberg faced upon the release of Crash echoes those which Ballard received in 1973 when the novel was published. The New York Times literary critic said, "Crash is, hands-down, the most repulsive book I've yet to come across."

It’s a testament to how offensive Ballard’s subject matter is that Cronenberg still faced pushback even after he cut one of the novel’s most controversial subplots. Cronenberg keeps a scene that shows Elias Koteas' character Vaughan (who is essentially the Jay Gatsby of car crash perverts) performing a dangerous racetrack re-enactment of James Dean’s untimely fatal car crash for a small group of like-minded spectators, including James Spader’s lead character (who is essentially a pornographic reimagining of Nick Carraway from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ).

Related: The Fly: Why the 1986 Horror Movie is David Cronenberg's Best Film

What Cronenberg doesn’t show from Ballard’s novel, however, is Vaughan's obsession over what he believes would be his swan song: assassinating Elizabeth Taylor by crashing into her limousine. And not in some re-enactment like he does with James Dean. Vaughan wants to kill Hollywood's Cleopatra for real. Not only would Taylor have sued Cronenberg’s Canadian production company out of existence had he included this incendiary subplot from Ballard’s book, but its inclusion would also have narrowed its already-niche audience.

Cronenberg Should Have Filmed Crash in California, Not Canada

Ballard’s Crash is set in his home country of England. Cronenberg relocated the novel’s setting across the pond to his home country of Canada, specifically to Toronto, where he shot a majority of his films. Cronenberg does a fair job keeping the film’s setting vague with locations under highway overpasses and industrial areas on the edge of the city. But the characters in Crash are dressed in winter coats (when they’re not wearing leather or nothing at all) and the foggy weather literally hangs like a dark cloud over the entire film, both of which suggest a cold climate. For all the audience knows the film could be taking place in the Midwest or some city in New England. Seattle isn’t entirely out of the question.

Toronto’s green grass and cloudy skies distinguish Crash visually from the majority of erotic thrillers of its day, which were filmed primarily in Los Angeles. Yet, the audience can’t shake the feeling that something is a little off. Cronenberg has long prided himself on his ability to shoot his films far from the major Hollywood studios in California. And the cold backdrop of Canada works wonders in establishing the bleak tone in his films like Scanners (1981) and The Brood (1979).

But Crash is one of those rare movies that actually deserves to be set in California. Any movie that reenacts the death of a movie star from the Golden Age of Hollywood is practically begging to be filmed in the Golden State itself. It’s almost embarrassing that James Franco beat Cronenberg to the punch, shooting a scene in The Disaster Artist (2017) at James Dean’s actual crash site on a coastal stretch of highway near Monterey, California.

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Crash (I) (2004)

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Review: ‘Society of the Snow’ is a gripping tale of surviving the unthinkable

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A Uruguayan rugby team gets stranded in the Andes Mountains for 72 days after their plane crashes. Eventually the remaining survivors resort to eating the bodies of those who died in order to continue on. These true events that happened in 1972 — already the basis for a Hollywood film, 1993’s “Alive” — now become filmmaker J.A. Bayona’s “Society of the Snow,” a retelling that finds in the material more than just a simple tale of the perseverance of the human spirit.

Based on Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name, the screenplay by Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques-Olearraga and Nicolás Casariego also explores the emotional and spiritual struggle of what the survivors went through, maintaining their humanity even while facing the most inhuman of acts. As one character observes, “What was once unthinkable has become routine.” (The film is Spain’s entry for the international feature Academy Award and recently made the Oscars’ shortlist in the category, as well as for makeup and hairstyling, original score and visual effects.)

“Society of the Snow” is Bayona’s first Spanish-language feature since his debut with 2007’s gothic horror fable “The Orphanage.” Subsequent English-language films such as 2012’s tsunami survival drama “The Impossible” and the big-budget spectacle of 2018’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” have given Bayona a confidence that is slick but not hollow. With limited shooting done in the actual remote location of the crash and more accomplished in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, Bayona keeps the focus on the characters and what they are going through, allowing the effort of the production to fade to the background.

The crash itself is depicted with an unblinking, bone-crunching power, as seats and bodies collapse into each other like dominoes, making it seem unbelievable anyone survived at all. Later, having carved out a small sense of day-to-day normalcy in their waiting game, the survivors are struck by an avalanche that upends their lives once again.

It is somewhat inevitable to compare the film to the current television series “Yellowjackets,” in which a ’90s American high school girls soccer team crashes in the Pacific Northwest and also resorts to cannibalism. While that show attempts to strike a balance between the ordeal of being stranded and the adult survivors dealing with the ongoing aftermath of their trauma, “Society of the Snow” remains firmly rooted in the immediacy of the events.

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The rugby team is known as the Old Christians and the story places an emphasis not on individual heroics but on the collective effort of the group, their sacrifices up to and including the giving of their very bodies and flesh. As the final moments of the film make explicit, the meaning of what they went through is up to the individual, for each to take away what they will. Bayona mixes a sense of survivalist adventure with an otherworldly spirituality — the idea that they were somehow touched by something bigger, but also that the answers to what they needed were there with them all along.

'Society of the Snow'

In Spanish with English subtitles Rating: R, for violent/disturbing material and brief graphic nudity Running time: 2 hours, 24 minutes Playing: In limited release Dec. 22; streaming on Netflix Jan. 4

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Aram Rappaport ’s “The Crash” marks a very undistinguished convergence of two genres that have burgeoned in recent years: dark, brooding financial dramas reflecting fears unleashed by the 2008 economic recession, and thrillers that hinge on the spiraling perils of computers and related technologies.

But the movie may find its real niche in history by belonging to another, very curious and inevitably rather risible subgroup: Films Made in the Expectation that Hillary Clinton Would Become President.

Set in the very near future, “The Crash” concerns an effort to thwart a hacking of the stock market that could wreak havoc on the whole financial system, an effort involving members of the White House staff. Since their work reaches to the top of the executive branch, we occasionally hear mention of “Madame President.” Late in the story, we even catch glimpses of that eminence, who sweeps through a couple of scenes in a bustling, official hurry. She has straight blonde hair that obscures her face when she leans forward, but we know who this is supposed to be.

No doubt half of Americans could view this character with sarcastic satisfaction, while the other half might cringe with the realization that, a certain glass ceiling having remained undamaged by the 2016 election, “Madame President” will for the foreseeable future mark any movie as to belonging the realm of fiction—or erroneous anticipation.

Ironically, it’s not the defeated candidate but the victor of the last election whose lifestyle is most evoked by this film’s protagonist. Rather than being a real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star, however, Guy Clifton ( Frank Grillo ) is a flashy criminal who has managed to hold onto his palatial estate despite having been indicted for illegal stock-trading activities that have entailed some masterly hacking skills on his part.

“The Crash” kicks off when the feds, having found out about a planned hack by parties unknown that could collapse the U.S. stock market on a certain date, see no better course than to ask Guy to head up an attempt to derail the dastardly crime and discover its perpetrators. To that end, he assembles a small team of geeks with the skills to tackle the unconventional technical challenge.

There are two potential pitfalls in any film with this one’s premise, and “The Crash” tumbles into them both. One is that the peril being combated is too abstract to carry the emotional urgency of, say, an alien invasion or asteroid hurtling toward the earth. A stock market crash? The film imagines its disaster as prompting a run on the banks, and it provides glimpses of people fighting to reach ATMs. But all of this, it must be admitted, is not exactly California falling into the San Andreas fault on the fright-o-meter scale.

The other, related pitfall comes from a story that concerns high-tech dangers and remedies remaining too bound by them. Which is to say, this is the latest film with far too many scenes of people waving their arms in front of computers, shouting about algorithms and such. It’s a drawback only compounded by Rappaport’s style, which marshals enough shaky-cam spasmodics, unnecessary zooms, herky-jerky editing and other predictable visual tics to make the film look like a television cast-off.

Granted, Rappaport’s script tries to combat the two pitfalls just mentioned by introducing melodramatic elements concerning, say, Guy’s unsteady relationship with his wife (British-accented Minnie Driver ) and their daughter, who is beset not only with cancer but also a sketchy boyfriend and guilt over her family’s wealth. But none of this goes very far toward making Guy an interesting character, nor does Grillo’s performance, which comes across mostly as Pacino Lite (i.e., the recessive and smoldering Al, rather than the wildly gesticulating, eye-rolling, shouting-to-the-rafters Al).

Without giving too much away, it must be noted that other political discontents of recent times appear in the film’s depiction of its baddies: the heads of the nation’s major banks and the Federal Reserve System. These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra ’s most feverish populist nightmares. One might well believe in their monumental greed and malign intentions in real life, especially if the outgoing president had thrown any of their sort in prison. Here, they just serve as a reminder that fiction can hardly remedy what politics leaves untouched.

Godfrey Cheshire

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications.

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• Minnie Driver as Shannon Clifton
• Jessa Zarubica as Rebecca Abby
• Dianna Agron as Amelia Rhondart
• Aram Rappaport

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6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

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By The New York Times

In the name of the mother, the sons and the hokey ghost.

‘The Deliverance’

In this horror movie directed by Lee Daniels, a young mother (Andra Day) tries to protect her children from demonic possession and convince the social worker monitoring her family of the supernatural occurrences.

From our review:

The usual possession beats are here — creepy crawling! smoking crucifixes! shivering violins! — and given their own quirky spins. (One key revelation takes place over coffees at McDonald’s.) … We absolve the odd logic jumps and clumsy sound design choices in our zeal for the big, brazen moments engineered to make us race out of the theater and tell our friends what we’ve just seen.

Watch on Netflix . Read the full review .

A historic moment; a prosaic film.

Chaos is a convenient smoke screen when a family of thieves carries out a heist during the riots that followed the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King.

The Los Angeles riots ultimately amount to little more than a plot device in “1992,” a rote heist thriller that tosses in a double dose of father-son melodrama. Or maybe the paternal bonding has been grafted on to the caper. Either way, nothing in the foreground of this hacky effort, directed by Ariel Vromen, is as interesting as what is happening in the backdrop — which is to say, the verdict handed down in the police beating of Rodney King, and its aftermath.

In theaters. Read the full review .

A biopic that wears its bias proudly.

Dennis Quaid stars as Ronald Reagan triumphantly taking down the Soviet Union in this flattering biopic from Sean McNamara.

In this unabashed love letter to the former president, Reagan was the force behind the fall of the Soviet Union. The movie implies that this “evil empire” collapsed as a result not just of his presidency, but of his anti-Communist activism during his entertainment career in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. These eras are depicted in scenes strongly suggesting that before shooting, the cinematographer, Christian Sebaldt, happened upon a fire sale on diffusion filters at the camera store. … It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

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