crash

Couldn’t sleep last night. This was due, in part, I think, to a suddenly crazy work schedule (which ordinarily wouldn’t bother me, but I had planned to spend this week on other things) and in part to Crash, which the New Yorker cheerfully exalts as a “brazenly alive and heartbreaking film.” I didn’t watch it because it won. I watched it because I finally found it available on the shelves of my redemptive albeit hit-and-miss DVD club and it is the only one of the five nominees for best pic, the only one, to appear in any form, big screen or small, in my charming but unfortunate, culturally deprived town.

After the first five minutes, I found the film and each subsequent crash in it superfluous and heavy-handed (as my college poetry teacher used to say). The New Yorker says the “bizarre coincidences” that predictably and inexorably weave the disparate characters’ lives into one plot, as if all of Los Angeles consisted of about 25 people, “feel exactly right.” I remember saying “oh, brother” more than once.

Still, things do happen: the bad cop and the good cop do a classic flip-flop; Sandra Bullock nails the rich but desperate housewife (watch out for those slippery socks on your extravagantly slick wooden floors!); a magic mantle saves a little girl whose incongruously tatooed daddy is the most sympathetic character in the film.

I’ve never been to L.A. The America I know is rarely the one that makes it to the movies. There is plenty of ignorance that looks an awful lot like intolerance, but I think it does a great disservice to put so obvious and so violent a face on it. We swallow it in small doses, and the more we swallow, the more insidious it becomes.