Revdarth.com

Just got finished watching the movie Crash. Gonna have to take some serious time to process the movie, but I am just stunned after watching the movie. Nearly impossible to summarize the plotline, but basically the movie deals with racism in its most insidious senses. While there are parts of overt racism in the movie, the side of racism dealt more with here is the much-more-subtle form. The little comments here and there. The ways that people give glances towards others. The deeply held stereotypes that come out in various ways. And it even has some aspects that explain where people develop racist attitudes and brings that to play in several areas. It was a movie that captivated me from pretty much the first moment. The movie begins with two lines that, by the end of the movie, encapsulate really everything about the movie…It begins with Don Cheadle saying, “We are always surrounded by steel and glass, and so, we crash into each other just to have some human contact.” and then his partner in the car seeks to correct him by saying that they got rear-ended, spun around twice, and somewhere in there “one of us lost our frame of reference.”

However, the irony is, that she speaks that as if it were a bad thing. If I could encapsulate the movie, I think the director is trying to tell us that “We do need to lose our frames of reference” because our frames of reference keep leading us down the same dark, muddled, messed up roads where we mistrust others becuase of what they look like, how they talk, how many tatoos they have, what we suspect they have in their pockets, and more.

The spiritual side of this film hits me as well. A blog review that I read of the film (click for review) sums it up well when the writer (Maurice Broaddus) says, “Who did this? We did. Graham’s drug-addicted mother echoes the words of Christ when she says “I asked you to find your brother, but you were too busy.” We have to have some hard conversations and build what may be some uncomfortable bridges…We all are victims of racism and guilty of racism, but we don’t have to be defined by it.”

We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. We are all interconnected in this life and how we treat one affects how we treat all and all treat others. In our disconnected world, we do need to touch one another so that we don’t just end up crashing into one another when we are so out of touch. The little touches of love, grace, and hope can keep at bay the times when we have gone so long without being touched that we wake up every day angry (like Jean in the movie) and unable to understand why.

What a film. 10 out of 10 for me on imdb.com…