Watching Crash, the recurring thought that popped into my mind was `Damn, I wonder how these people afford auto insurance.' I mean, here we have a movie about people screwing like rabbits while at the same time crashing cars left and right. And, although Crash's really made of a lot tougher stuff than the two of those, they constitute such a large amount of the plot and curious draw of this safe haven of sadomasochism that the producers used the quote `…sex and car crashes' (ironically, from a review that blasts the film) to advertise their celluloid psychosexual psychosis. Leave it to me to be thinking of auto insurance rates, when a sexy actresses like Deborah Kara Unger is going at it onscreen.
Crash is the story of James Ballard (James Spader, picking his most interesting (and perverse) role since Sex, Lies, and Videotape)), a man who is living in a marriage with a primal curse: his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), cannot reach orgasm. She loves sex – her habits are downright nymphomaniacle and the marriage is open-ended – but nothing she can do can make her reach orgasm. Her husband makes this both his personal quest and problem… the two wonder constantly about each other's sexual partners, go at it at least twice a day, and often have sex at the office. Yet nothing's quite doing it for Cathy. She's just not getting her big O.
One day, while driving home from working on a car crash safety commercial, Ballard has a head-on-collision with Dr. Helen Remmington (Holly Hunter). Remmington's husband dies, flying through the windshield, and the last thing Ballard witnesses before he passes out is Remmington ripping open her shirt and proceeding to begin enjoying herself in the car.
It gets kinkier. Much, much kinkier.
Once out of rehab for the accident, Ballard meets Vaughn (Elias Koteas, acting just as creepy as he did in Exotica): a man obsessed with the sexual aspect of the car crash. Vaughn lives in his car and re-enacts famous auto accidents for a living, starting us off with an absolutely riveting performance of James Dean's fatal car crash. Played with a charismatic schizophrenia reminiscent of Tyler Durden, Vaughn's the type of person leading a quieter revolution towards `the recreation of man in a mechanical form'… a world in which the lines between male and female, as well as those between humanoid and machine, are blurred. The DOT doesn't like this all too much, but this openly sexual underground goes far beyond them in staying hidden.
Most of the rest of the movie is spent developing a love triangle between Vaughn and Ballard and Catherine… yep: get ready for a little good old homoeroticism or get out. One particular scene that will cause the religious right to freak is when Unger vividly describes the taste of semen to excite Ballard.
One of the few films that could work for both a trechcoat-wearing theatergoer and a highbrow intellectual at the same time, Crash manages to simultaneously ask the questions `What makes for a normal relationship?' and `Have you gotten off yet?' and not, well, crash in the middle. Yet when it reaches the end we have solved nothing, proved nothing. No character progress has been made, and Cathy still has her little problem. If I were less tired and more patient, I might rewatch Crash to try to figure out what the hell is going on here, but it's late, and I'm ready to simply say what just about everyone else says when they're done watching Crash: `Boy, that was one really fucked up movie.'
RATING: ***1/2
MPAA Rating: NC-17
Director: David Cronenberg Producer: David Cronenberg Writer: David Cronenberg Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Unger, and Rosanna Arquette
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