After every Oscar announcement, there are the perfunctory exchanges between those who think the best picture award ought to have gone to this film, and those who reckon it should not to have gone to that. Splitting cinematic hairs makes for good debate. So, that is what we will do this day out. But, we will take only two films into consideration for this blog post – Crash and Munich. Not because one happened to like one and not the other. But, because cinematically the two films throw up a lot of interesting similarities and dissimilarities.
This was not essentially a clash of titans – it was one between David and Goliath. For Paul Haggis, it was his maiden venture. Steven Spielberg, as we all know, is part of world cinema folklore. Few knew of Haggis before they had seen or even heard of Crash. He had remained stuck to the confines of small screen for years, either writing or directing episodes. [For those interested in trivia, Haggis was one of the 80-odd writers who had worked with Diff'rent Strokes, a television serial that ran from 1978 to 1986.]
Herein lies the first point of contrast. When one went to see Crash, one did not have any expectations, the starcast notwithstanding. Every aspect about the film – from its taut script to handling of human emotions – everything came as a pleasant surprise. Munich, on the other hand, was a let-down through and through. It belied even the most reasonable of expectations. Agreed, you cannot make Schindler's List every time, but you can at least expect an Amistad once in a decade. The day Spielberg decided to make a screen adaptation of Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas, he should have known what he was getting into. Especially since it was based on a fictionalised account of real life happennings.
The two films had similar narrative structures. Flashbacks that carried forward the otherwise seamless classic Hollywood linear narrative. Yet, debutante Haggis seemed to have had a better grasp of editing than Spielberg displayed. Maybe, the latter was slightly preoccupied with keeping his film within the docu-drama framework.
Editing is not just arrangement of shots and sequences. Haggis went much beyond that with his deft arrangement of events. Not without reason – both the story and screenplay were his. Robert Moresco was his co-screenplaywriter. And that's just for the record. Neither Moresco not editor Hughes Winborne are people you would have heard of before. You would not have heard of the films they had worked on earlier either. The control that Haggis exerted over the film is what made Crash what it became – a film worth remembering.
Tautness of script, cutting now to Munich, was not something Tony Kushner and Eric Roth could deliver to Spielberg in their rendition of Vengeance. One cannot buy the argument that you cannot have a gripping narrative of an account that is spread over years. Kushner-Roth tried hard, but were a disaster. The storyline became longdrawn, and the jump cuts (not over shots, but events) failed to leave one spellbound. The inserts of the events at Munich seemed to be thrown in as a desperate measure to stitch the story together. They come a cropper, and, instead, went on only to stretch the narrative. Michael Kahn, who has worked as editor for Spielberg a zillion times from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Color Purple to Amistad and Schindler's List, probably did not have much left to salvage.
It is not that either film did not have its share of goof-ups (all from IMDB.com). Crash has few in comparison; Munich has one-too-many from a meticulous director.
Crash:
- Just after Farhad fires at Daniel, the camera cuts away and then cuts back. When it returns to Farhad, the hammer of the revolver is once again cocked, which it would not normally do - and it is presumed that Farhad didn't pull the hammer back again since he was stunned at what he had just done.
- When Cameron pulls over to the street corner to let Anthony out of the car (after their run-in with the police,) you can see Anthony's legs getting out of the car. Then they are back in the car talking and only then does Anthony get out.
- When Cameron and his Christine get pulled over by Officers Hansen and Ryan, Ryan hands Cameron's license and registration to Hansen. They never give back the license and registration, and Cameron just drives away.
- A reflection in the car window shows Peter's hand already fully open holding his figurine while he sits dying after being shot by Officer Hanson. However, when the scene cuts to his hand a few seconds after he dies, it is then closed again and opens up.
Munich:
- When dialing the phone number of the booby-trapped phone for the second time, Carl begins with a different digit than he did the first time he called.
- Avner meets his French contact in front of a Paris kitchen design showroom. A year or more later he meets his contact in front of the same window. The model kitchen on display has not changed. In reality, the display would have changed several times in that amount of time, particularly in Paris.
- Avner meets Andreas and his friend Tony in a Rome café, there is a huge statue of Queen Victoria, in her extremely distinctive pose, in the middle of the square, with the British coat of arms on the pedestal, betraying the location as Malta.
- When Avner and Ephraim are walking along the sea front in Israel - there are modern Maltese phone boxes and buses in the background.
- Golda Meir tells Avner "mazel tov" for the baby that is not yet born. It is commonly known that saying "mazel tov" for an unborn baby is bad luck.
- When observing the first victim in Rome, Steve and an Italian girl are watching him from an Alfa Romeo Giulia (model 1974 or later, with a straight trunk). When the victim walks through the street, putting on his coat, Steve and the girl drive away in a Lancia Flavia. When the victim is in the store they arrive at the scene in the Alfa Romeo Giulia again where the girl gets out of the car.
- Though they took the time to digitally insert the World Trade Centre in the final shot of the film, they did not edit out the Citigroup Centre and the Bloomberg building (two obvious landmarks that were built after the time setting of the film).
So, now you know there were less problems with Crash than with Munich. Perfection is difficult to achieve, all said and agreed, but letting viewers catch your avoidable bloomers can be embarrassing.
Even if one were to discount all that has been said so far, the clincher lies elsewhere – the fact that the weakness of Munich is the strength of Crash. The fact that Paul Haggis does not pontificate, and Steven Spielberg cannot help himself from trying to sound politically correct. Serious film is always auteur cinema. The filmmaker is not just the person who has been given a lot of money by a production house to make a film that will rake in dollars and awards or both. The director is the author of the film. How successful one is at carrying this out depends on just one factor – subtlety.
It is precisely here that Haggis outscores Spielberg – he does not fall into the trap of passing a sweeping judgment, while the latter far exceeds his brief as a storyteller in making a political statement that was not needed. The auteur, the author, speaks through his/her characters. So Haggis does as much, and leaves it to the viewer to decide for himself/herself. Spielberg, on the other hand, speaks through the protagonist and makes Black September look like one Israeli misadventure.
Munich is about wondering whether there is an enemy at all.
Crash, on the other hand, is about the enemy in us all.
