International Oscar Showdown 2006 — Crash vs Tsotsi
Bong Joon Ho’s movie Parasite made history at the 2020 Academy Awards, becoming the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture.
In this series, in reverse chronological order, I compare previous years’ Best Picture and Best International Feature to see how many other foreign-language films ought to have been given the top gong.
**** This article contains spoilers! ****
My wife is not a film critic, but she does have a way with words, and this was her immediate assessment of Crash after we watched it a few nights ago:
“That was toilet.”
I’m inclined to agree with her. However, as a writer, it is my duty to elaborate upon her insightful three-word review — to the tune of, say, 1,400 words.
So: what makes Crash “toilet”?
Before we get to that, a quick summary for those of you who have wiped the film from your minds: Crash is an ensemble movie, written and directed by Paul Haggis, and set in Los Angeles, depicting stereotypical characters being racist until they’re not, or who aren’t racist until they tragically are. It’s also about interconnections, the kind that in real life make you say “Hey, small world,” but in cinema make you say, “Yeah yeah, likely story.”
To illustrate: Don Cheadle plays Detective Waters, who is the older brother of car-jacker Peter (Larenz Tate), who steals the car of the district attorney Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Jean (Sandra Bullock). Jean, in a racist fervour, looks unfavourably upon the work of Hispanic locksmith Daniel (Michael Peña), who is subsequently abused by Persian shopkeeper Farhad (Shaun Toub). Meanwhile, racist cop Ryan (Matt Dillon) and his not-so racist partner Hansen (Ryan Phillippe) pull over black television director Cameron (Terrence Howard) as he is receiving fellatio from his wife Christine (Thandie Newton). Ryan abuses his power and gropes Christine, only to be the first police officer on the scene of a car crash later in the film in which Christine is stuck in an upturned and imminently exploding vehicle. And…
