Paul Haggis – Movie Musings

Elizabeth Banks and Russell Crowe go on the run in workmanlike thriller The Next Three Days

Director: Paul Haggis

Cast: Russell Crowe (John Brennan), Elizabeth Banks (Laura Brennan), Brian Dennehy (George Brennan), Lennie James (Lt Nabulsi), Olivia Wilde (Nicole), Ty Simpkins (Luke Brennan), Helen Carey (Grace Brennan), Liam Neeson (Damon Pennington), Daniel Stern (Meyer Fisk)

What would you do to protect the person you love? How far would you go to keep her safe? What would you sacrifice? What rules would you break? Paul Haggis’ serviceable thriller tries to answer these questions, but doesn’t really get much closer to the answers than I have here.

Russell Crowe is John Brennan, a teacher of English Literature at a mid-ranking college. One day, his wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks) is arrested for the murder of her boss. Despite her pleas of innocence, before they know it she is sentenced to spend most of the rest of her life behind bars. When desperation at the thought of her fate – and missing the upbringing of their young son – leads her to attempt suicide, John decides to take the extreme step of breaking her out of prison. But where to begin with the planning? And what will he be prepared to do?

It’s the sort of film that early-on has the lead character meet a ruthless expert (in this case an ex-con with a history of prison breaks, played with a growling enjoyment by Liam Neeson in a one-scene cameo) who outlines a list of rules and terrible things that the hero will be forced to do. The hero looks askance – but sure enough each situation arises and doncha know it the hero is forced to bend his own morality to meet the needs of his mission. What a surprise.

Only of course the film doesn’t have the courage to force Crowe’s John to actually do things that bend his morality. There is always a get-out clause. When his actions lead to him taking a petty criminal’s life (while stealing money from a drug den), it’s self-defence. When he looks like he may be forced to put innocent people in harm’s way, he backs away. When he’s asked to sacrifice something major, he refuses. The film wants to be the sort of film where we see the lead character change inexorably as he becomes harder and more ruthless to achieve his mission. But it worries about losing our sympathy, so constantly gives the audience and the character get-out clauses to excuse his behaviour.

Not that Crowe gives a bad performance – he’s actually rather convincing as a humble, slightly timid man way out of his depth at the start – but the film fails completely to show these events really changing the man. It believes that it’s turning him into a darker, more ruthless person, but it isn’t. At heart, this film isn’t really a character-study at all but a dark caper movie. Obstacles are constantly thrown in the path of our hero, many of which bamboozle him: but then when we hit the prison break itself at last, suddenly he’s pulling carefully planned rabbits and double bluffs out of his hat like Danny Ocean. It’s a film that wants to have its cake and eat it: to show a hero bewildered by his task, in danger from this ruthless world he finds himself in – but also to have him become a sort of long-game con artist thinking three moves ahead of the police.

It just doesn’t quite tie up. It’s the film adapting to whatever it feels the requirements and desires of the audience might be at a particular moment rather than something that develops naturally. Enjoyable as it is to see these sort of games play out, you can’t help but feel a little bit cheated – there has been no indication before this that the character has this level of ingenuity in him.

He doesn’t even really need to pay a price beyond that which he had accepted from the start: at points major sacrifices are dangled before him but he never needs to make any of them. He never has to really bend his personal morality significantly. It’s the cleanest conversion to criminality that you are likely to see.

The film cracks along at a decent pace – even if it is a little too long – and shows its various twists and reveals fairly well. Elizabeth Banks is pretty good as Laura, even though she hardly seems the most sympathetic character from the start (the audience has to do a bit of work for why Crowe’s character seems so devoted to her). Most of the rest of the cast are basically slightly larger cameos but no one disgraces themselves.

The main problem with the film is its lack of depth and ambition. Mentioning Don Quixote several times in the narrative doesn’t magically grant a film depth and automatically create intelligent contrasts with the novel. Instead it just sounds like straining for depth rather than actually having it.

Matt Dillon and Thandie Newton deal with racism in tedious best picture disaster Crash

Director: Paul Haggis

Cast: Sanda Bullock (Jean Cabot), Don Cheadle (Detective Graham Walters), Matt Dillon (Sgt John Ryan), Jennifer Esposito (Ria), Brendan Fraser (DA Rick Cabot), Terrence Howard (Cameron Thayer), Ludacris (Anthony), Thandie Newton (Christine Thayer), Michael Peña (Daniel Ruiz), Ryan Phillippe (Officer Tom Hansen), Larenz Tate (Peter), Shaun Toub (Farhad), Bahar Soomekh (Dorri), William Fichtner (Flanagan), Keith David (Lt Dixon), Bruce Kirby (‘Pop’ Ryan), Beverly Todd (Mrs Waters)

If you had to name the least popular Best Picture winner, there is a fair chance the name you’d come up with Crash. Crash was a surprise winner in 2005, beating out Ang Lee’s tender gay-cowboy classic Brokeback Mountain. Crash was a little independent movie, filmed in and around Los Angeles, that seemed to be tackling big themes – racism, humanity, fate, blah blah blah. To be fair, Paul Haggis’ film is giving it a go. But what you get is just hugely, well, average. It’s not a film that has aged well, and it’s not a film that has enough depth to it to overcome the general cynicism towards it.

The film follows a kaleidoscope of events in Los Angeles, each of which revolves around clashes between different races, with stories that are shown to interlink. So we have an ambitious DA (a miscast Brendan Fraser) and his wife (a pretty good Sandra Bullock) carjacked by two gangbangers (Ludacris and Larenz Tate). A TV director (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton) are pulled over then assaulted by a bigoted cop (Matt Dillon), despite the fears of his nervous liberal partner (Ryan Phillippe). A locksmith (Michael Peña) deals with racial suspicions from the DA’s wife, and from a Persian shop owner (Shaun Toub), who is himself the victim of racial abuse. A cop (Don Cheadle) and his partner (Jennifer Esposito) investigate two undercover cops who shot each other, monitored by the DA. And so it goes on.

Crash could be pretty much relabelled Racism Actually. In fact, it shares a lot of traits with Richard Curtis’ loosely assembled series of shaggy dog stories, feeling as they do like off-cuts and half assembled scraps of ideas from Haggis’ writing desk. But what he ends up wheeling out here is a manipulative, cliché-filled pile of earnest claptrap, in which basically a series of unpleasant characters behave unpleasantly towards each other. You can see why the ageing academy might have warmed to it – it’s a film that looks at racism, by exploring how, gosh darn it don’t you know “everybody is a little bit racist” sometimes.

On top of that, Haggis’ film relies overwhelmingly on coincidence and the tired “we are all linked together” clichés. It wants to try and make big statements about the prejudices and victimisation that we all suffer in our different ways – but it delivers them in such a clumsy and manipulative way your nose ends bruised by the number of points hit on it. For starters, do people really throw around racial slurs as readily and immediately as the characters in this film do? Surely the real danger of racism is not the people who shout racist nicknames and get angry immediately – isn’t the real danger of racism its incipient nature, the quiet whispers behind closed doors or the barriers gently but firmly put in the way?

This film turns racism into something loud, obvious and crass. And then it produces a film that does the same thing. The script is full of scenes which never feel real, – every conversation in the piece turns into a clumsy series of “we all hold prejudiced views” or “I’ve got more depths than you think” statements that always feel fake. Not once do the characters sound like real people. It’s the sort of clumsy, crappy, thuddingly worthy film-making that ostentatiously believes itself to be great film-making, when in fact it’s as average as cornflakes.

Even the more effective moments only work because they are so manipulative: the confrontation at gunpoint between the locksmith and shop owner, and the rescue of Thandie Newton from a burning car by Matt Dillon’s brutish cop. When they are happening, these moments are strangely gripping – but literally the instant they finish, you are struck by how Haggis has filmed them in such an operatic, balls-to-the-wall way you would have to work pretty hard not to be swept up in them. Effective manipulation is still manipulation – and manipulation really shouldn’t be this easy to spot. Certainly not within seconds of it happening.

But nearly all the characters are so simple and cookie-cutter that, despite the quality of the acting, you never connect with them. It doesn’t help that Haggis’ unsubtle screenplay is desperate to point up “surprise” personality twists – the “you think they are like this, but look: here they behaving totally differently. People are more complex than you think!” card is played so often it starts getting worn out. All of this serves to boil down to a trite message that when we try and get along with each other everything eventually might work its way out. Oh please, give me a break.

The acting, though, is actually pretty good. Sure Brenda Fraser is horribly miscast, and Don Cheadle is stuck with a terrifically boring cop who has to hold some of the narrative threads together, but there are plenty of decent performances. Sandra Bullock gets to show she has some solid dramatic chops, Thandie Newton is a pretty much a revelation as a seemingly shrewish wife, Terrence Howard mines a lot out of a clichéd middle-class black man going through a mid-life crisis. Ludacris and Lorenz Tate are excellent as the two gangbangers, although their dialogue and actions never feel real at all. Michael Peña is very endearing as just about the only outright likeable character. Dillon got a lot of praise (and an Oscar nomination) as the racist cop and he is fine (though dozens of actors could do what he does here), even though the character is thin as paper and relies on having the two of the best impact scenes.

Dillon’s character is a good example of the film’s moral shallowness. Perhaps it’s the #MeToo era, but do I think that Dillon’s clearly racist manner and his sexual assault on Newton’s character is cancelled out because he saves her from a fire and treats his dying Dad well? I mean, what is this sort of laziness? The film says “ah ha look viewer you thought he was a bad guy, but look at his depth”. So forget the sexual assault because he saved his victim’s life the next day. Wow. Don’t get me started on the contrived weighting of the scales the film puts together so that our opinion is shifted on Phillipe’s good cop. The film is full of this sort of clumsy, ham-fisted, chin stoking, liberal garbage that feels overwhelmingly patronising.

But then this is a film that doesn’t trust you to think. It is the ultimate middle-class, hand-wringing exercise in “oh if only we could fix the world through good things” nonsense. It shouts and shouts and shouts at you about racism, but never really tells you anything other than that bad-tempered, ignorant people will do bad-tempered ignorant things. It smugly says “of course we are better, but guess what viewer, this sort of thing does happen”. Only of course the script is so thin, the general film-making so thuddingly average and unsubtle, the story and morality so shallow, that its preachy hectoring only really serves to turn you off. Anyone with a brain will get the message within the first 10 minutes. The film takes another hour and a half to catch up with you. The worst Best Picture winner ever? It’s gotta be up there.