CNN's review of David Cronenberg's 'Crash'

'Crash' is so ludicrous

March

>From Movie Reviewer Paul Tatara 

The jury at last year's Cannes Film Festival (led by Francis Ford
Coppola) created a controversial special award for "Crash," David
Cronenberg's valentine to the possibilities of sex and car wrecks.

That would be sex and car wrecks in conjunction with each other, as in
sex before car wrecks, sex after car wrecks and sex during car
wrecks. The award cited the filmmaker's "audacity." In my mind, that
sent up a warning flag like a blind date with a "nice personality."

Cronenberg, at his best, is close to visionary, a singularly talented,
far-reaching director whose output has grown more assured over the
years, rather than falling apart (or into repetition), as is so often
the case. I thought his "Dead Ringers" was far and away the most
passionately crafted, memorable film of 1988, and even "Naked Lunch,"
which promised to be well-dressed but revolting, was much more than
that.

I couldn't think of a better word to describe Cronenberg's first
movie, "They Came From Within," than audacious, but that one is a
poorly written, poorly shot quease-fest in which characters pass huge
parasites to one another during sex. "Crash" is audacious, all right.

On the other hand, it is also a beautifully photographed load of
garbage.

Immoral or just silly?

In interviews, Cronenberg is an extremely thoughtful, intelligent man.
"Crash" suggests he may be going a little far-afield to shake the (by
now, long outdated) gross-out tag that many people still saddle him
with.

He has a tendency to appear in photographs thoughtfully fingering his
smart-guy glasses, as if he's considering the Cuban missile crisis
rather than getting a huge cockroach to spout passages from the
William Burroughs oeuvre out of its anus.

There was a lot of debate a while ago as to whether "Crash" was
immoral, whether it should be released at all. I don't think anyone
should be worried. The story is so ludicrous, you feel more conned
than corrupted when it's all over. (An NC-17 rating assures us that no
children will get to watch the film for at least a year, when it comes
out on video and they can freeze-frame all the best stuff.)

If you've been hearing Letterman and Leno making jokes about the
contents of "Crash" for the past few months, you would be convinced
that the film consists of little more than folks getting all hot and
bothered around fresh auto accidents, and then jumping the bones of
nearby, like-minded individuals.

You would be right. 

The idea that there could possibly be like-minded individuals when
considering so severe a kink is what gives the film its unique,
idi-erotic edge, as in part idiotic, part erotic. People who like to
groom poodles while hang-gliding seems about as reasonable a topic for
a movie, but judging from the hushed, reverent way the actors deliver
the dialogue in "Crash," Cronenberg seems to think he's really onto
something.

Swingers and erotic vagaries

James Spader plays James Ballard, the namesake of J.G. Ballard, who
wrote the novel that Cronenberg's script is based on. As the film
opens, James and his wife, Catherine, (Deborah Kara Unger) have not
yet developed a taste for twisted metal, but that doesn't mean they're
not twisted. In the '60s they would have been called swingers, but
that would require martinis and fake leopard-skin, so in this case
they're considered darkly troubled.

James, who works on TV commercials, makes his first appearance while
on top of a comely young camera assistant. Catherine, one hot babe,
debuts while being ridden by a mechanic at a local airport. She likes
to press her breasts against an airplane's cold steel during sex.
But, then again, who doesn't?

Spader and Unger are as passable as you can be while doing something
this silly, but the scenes where they sit around their apartment and
murmur erotic vagaries to each other are just plain dumb.

Unger is very, very sexy, but she breathlessly whispers every single
piece of dialogue Cronenberg gives her, as if she's trying to seduce a
priest in a confessional. I wouldn't put it past her character, mind
you, but she never gets around to it.

Shot in Cronenberg's trademark icy-blue sheen, these scenes, and the
movie as a whole, come off as falsely meaningful, like Bob Guccione
proudly reciting his favorite Penthouse letter out loud.

Out of control?

Holly Hunter is also along for the careening ride, as the woman whose
car Spader smacks into, head-on, at the beginning of the film. Her
husband flies through both windshields and ends up dangling (real
dead) next to Spader. Spader is bashed to pieces, but he composes
himself long enough to notice that Hunter's breast is exposed as she
tries to climb from the wreckage.

Holly Hunter's breast should become a lawyer, because it somehow
convinces Spader that sex in blood-caked, smashed-up automobiles might
be a really neat idea. Unfortunately, the audience is not allowed to
vote on this. Later, Hunter comes to the same inexplicable
conclusion. Yes, America, James Spader and Holly Hunter pretend to
have sex in a blood-caked, smashed-up automobile. Is it possible to
take back an Oscar? As I watched this, the old lady sitting down the
row from me, sport that she was, openly chortled.

Cronenberg has been saying that the film should be taken as a sort of
science fiction, a meditation on where our national obsession with
speed, technology and sex may ultimately lead us.

That sounds like a pretty cool movie, but it isn't the one he's made.
These characters don't remotely suggest that they're stand-ins for
you, me, or anyone we know. In fact, their sexual quirks are their
only defining characteristics.

It's hard to be fascinated by any of this when there is absolutely no
motivation behind what's happening, aside from the fact that a couple
of people banged into each other on the freeway ... and I do mean
banged. No one in "Crash" ever goes to the store to buy a gallon of
milk. They're too busy getting hood ornaments tattooed on their torsos
and having their friends kiss the artwork before the wound heals. If
this is where our obsession with speed, technology, and sex is leading
us, I'm boycotting those Cindy Crawford Cadillac ads right now.

Rosanna Arquette appears in a couple of scenes as Gabrielle, a
seductive woman who was crippled in a horrible freeway mishap, but
... I'll let you guess. Time's up! She likes to have sex in crushed
automobiles. The most revolting moment in the movie is when Spader
takes the huge brace off of her leg and tongues the bulging, unsightly
scar tissue. Howard Shore's excellent electronic score is a moody
distraction, but you would probably be better off listening to it at
home on a compact disc, far, far away from Rosanna Arquette's leg.

Elias Koteas portrays the most laughable character, a sort of
sex-and-wrecks guru named Vaughan, who likes to recreate famous car
crashes for bleachers full of adoring fetishists. One scene in which
he orchestrates James Dean's final wipeout is beyond ridiculous. I'm
wondering where Vaughan got the quarter of a million dollars to buy a
mint-condition, 1955 Porsche Spider for the sole purpose of riding in
it while it collides with an equally well-preserved Buick.

You would have to be pretty darn arousal-desperate to do something
this elaborate. Apparently Vaughan has never heard of a centerfold.
At one point he tells his followers that "a car crash is a liberation
of sexual energy."

Now, I ask you, if that were really the case, why in the world would
insurance cover it? A more interesting "science fiction" movie could
have been made about people who get a check from Allstate every time
they have an orgasm.