CRASH
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Fine Line) Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, based on the novel by J. G. Ballard. Producer: David Cronenberg. Director: David Cronenberg. MPAA Rating: NC-17 (graphic sexual content, violence, profanity) Running Time: 100 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In case you were wondering what all the consternation was about concerning CRASH -- the film which New Line chief Ted Turner nearly refused to release in America in a fit of moral outrage -- writer/director David Cronenberg makes it clear in the space of a few minutes. The first scene finds a woman (Deborah Kara Unger) having sex with a man while bent over the engine of a twin-prop plane; the second scene finds another man (James Spader) having sex with another woman on the desk of his office. In the third scene we learn that Unger and Spader are husband and wife Catherine and James Ballard, and that they have a habit of describing their affairs to each other in detail while having sex with each other.
That might be considered quite enough to get some folks worked into a lather, but, dear friends, you ain't seen nothin' yet. CRASH is really about what happens after James is responsible for an automobile accident which leaves him and another driver, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) badly injured, and kills Dr. Remington's husband. While in the hospital, Helen and James are approached by Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a strange man obsessed with car crashes. Vaughan draws Helen and James into his unique world, which includes re-creating celebrity car crashes for spectators and keeping scrapbooks of accident scenes and injuries. This obsession takes on a sexual dimension as well, as confrontations with mortality turn into expressions of primal appetites.
I am sure that there are plenty of people who would find plenty of things inherently repugnant about CRASH, including the fundamental sex-violence link and the fifteen individual scenes involving some kind of sexual behavior between the main characters in every possible form and gender permutation. CRASH involves some unpleasant subject matter, but I certainly don't think it is evil. There are plenty of dark corners of the human psyche -- many of them dealing with sex -- and CRASH explores how people might respond to the adrenaline rush of a brush with death in a world where they ordinarily feel deadened, dehumanized and disconnected. The fetishizing of destruction into a sexual act is part of a progression for these characters; they are like addicts searching for a new high when the old one is no longer enough to make them feel anything.
It's challenging stuff Cronenberg is serving up, but the reason CRASH ultimately doesn't work has nothing to do with the fact that it's challenging. If a film-maker is going to take a chance on creating a world this alien, he has to give his audience someone with whom to identify, someone to be their surrogate and tour guide. That person should be James, but it's not. James is a producer of soft-core porn films with a propensity for kinky sex when we first meet him, making it a relatively small step to the ghoulish carnality offered to him by Vaughan (played with creditable faux-DeNiro menace by Elias Koteas). The seductiveness of the crash cult needs to make sense to those of us who don't get off narrating our affairs to our wives, and Cronenberg doesn't make that happen. There is the briefest glimpse of an outsider's-eye-view when a car salesman assists James and another crash victim (Rosanna Arquette) in an erotic bit of showroom shopping, just enough to make you wish someone like that salesman had been for the previous hour. The relatively static nature of James' character also makes it evident that for all its excesses, CRASH lacks drama, a force pushing it towards some kind of revelation or resolution. Spader's performance as James is flat and detached throughout, and we need to have some understanding of his response to Vaughan's ever-more-extreme behavior; every development seems to strike him with the exact same mild confusion.
Some of Cronenberg's scenes are superbly crafted, effective and unsettling -- a tryst while going through a car wash is accompanied by overwhelming sounds of machinery, and one scene after a crash turns smoke from the wreckage into a romanticized mist over a meadow. Occasionally CRASH manages to be erotic, but far more often it is wearying, running sex scenes at you in waves and turning every available moment into an excuse for a grabbed crotch or a frantic menage-a-fill-in-the-blank. It was a mistake for Ted Turner to equate CRASH with pornography, because the average porno film probably has more plot. As fitfully intriguing as the psychology of CRASH may be, it's never engrossing. By failing to give his audience a sense of complicity, he has made them merely spectators at a rather monotonous freak show.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 crash test dummies: 4.
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