The film is based on the 1973 cult novel by visionary British novelist J.G. Ballard, who in a burst of self-lacerating bravado named the producer character (and narrator) after himself. It would appear to be a perfect fit for Canadian writer-producer-director Cronenberg, a sometime master of quease-in-art who specializes in tormenting the flesh.
But Crash turns out to be another of Cronenberg's static, self-important art duds, much worse than his wildly overrated Dead Ringers. (This is one underground director who generally improves when he surfaces into the mainstream, as in his 1983 The Dead Zone and his 1986 The Fly.) Cronenberg settles for putting Ballard's dark fantasia on screen coolly and simply, with its profuse promiscuity intact. It's a rank miscalculation. Without some cinematic sizzle burning away the distance between the viewers and the scarred menagerie of lovers and fiends, the dramatis personae become personae non grata. With their motivations--even their sensations--left somewhere in the stage directions, the actors succumb to zombie-hood. Rather than share their outre thoughts, we doubt whether there's anything behind their bug-eyed intensity. And when they enact one anal or rear-entry coupling after another (both hetero- and homosexual), usually in their cars, the scenes would be snicker-worthy if the tone weren't so solemn. Stripped of the book's hallucinatory aura, the rough sex becomes thudding wrong-way slapstick. You begin to yearn for something unusual--like, say, the missionary position.
If Crash proves anything, it's that one person's sexual obsession is another person's comedy routine. When Helen gyrates on top of Ballard in the driver's seat of a car, you don't think, "Far out!"; you think, "When did they disconnect the horn?" And when Ballard drives through a car wash as Vaughan and Ballard's wife make love in the back seat, it goes on so long you figure the attendant enjoyed the spectacle and let them pass through twice.
With red-light-running reaching epidemic proportions, a movie so specific about the adrenaline rush motorists get from flirting with disaster might at least have some "gotta-see" allure. But Cronenberg's film fails to eroticize its vehicles even as much as David Lynch does in Lost Highway; Robert Loggia's diatribe against tailgating in Lynch's enraging, uneven film has more force, humor, and sexuality than anything in Crash. In the novel, Ballard treats Vaughan's contorted sex acts and reenactments of famous accidents as a horrific route to transcendence ("these unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules, units in a new currency of pain and desire"). But Cronenberg does little more than illustrate Ballard's concepts and speechify about them.
Reading the script, just published by Faber and Faber, is fascinating, because it clarifies the gap between what Cronenberg thought he was doing and what he did. The revelations occur in the notes between the dialogue. Watching Spader's Ballard look down at the traffic from his apartment's balcony, I did feel as if the image were, in the script's words, an "immense motion sculpture, an incomprehensible pinball machine." (The reliable Peter Suschitzky did the cinematography.) But in the bulk of the scenes, Cronenberg doesn't bring to life his own descriptions. In another one of the film's unholy trysts, Vaughan makes it in his back seat with a whore while James, driving, watches from the rear-view mirror: "James," Cronenberg writes, "realizes that he can almost control the sexual act behind him by the way in which he drives the car. It is, in that sense, a sexual threesome--or, more properly, a foursome, because the sex between Vaughan and the whore takes place in the hooded grottoes of the luminescent dials, surging needles, and blinking lights of the black, brooding Lincoln." Unfortunately, the sense of threesomeness and foursomeness, the poetic reality of the "hooded grottoes" of the "brooding Lincoln," never register in the dank peepshow antics of the finished movie.
Faber and Faber has also just published an interview book, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, that shows one reason why he's become a rep-house and film-festival favorite. Like many a cult director, he's a canny highbrow salesman. What I found most hopeful about the volume were Cronenberg's tributes to some of his actors. He says that "Chris Walken's face" was the true subject of The Dead Zone, and remarks that Geena Davis (who costarred with Jeff Goldblum in The Fly) "is funny and sexy, and to me that is just the most diabolical combination."
Unfortunately, hardly anyone is charismatic or funny or sexy in Crash. Holly Hunter in sexual extremis is a lot more harsh and impenetrable than Marilyn Chambers (whom she resembles) was in Cronenberg's Rabid. Koteas, the Canadian art-house answer to De Niro, plays Vaughan with a glazed urgency that recalls, in looks and expressiveness, De Niro's Frankenstein. About the only one who comes off well is Rosanna Arquette, in the role of Vaughan's most glamorously mutilated lieutenant. Using an array of support garments and body braces with humorous self-awareness, she gives new meaning to the phrase "trick leg."
Crash.
James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, and Rosanna Arquette. Written by David Cronenberg, from the novel by J. G. Ballard. Directed by Cronenberg. Opens Friday.
