Haggis went from heart attack to hot auteur in two years flat
This year, the crystal ball is at its murkiest. With no sentimental favorite and no runaway hit (it's the first time in ages that none of the five nominees for Best Picture has grossed anywhere near $100 million), forecasters are asking themselves: Do Oscar voters want the gay movie or the race movie? For if there are two front runners, they are Brokeback Mountain, the sad love story of two cowpokes (and the women they ignore), and Crash, a drama about racial, social and sexual tensions that is as sprawling and congested as a big-city freeway system.
One of the more fanciful Oscar theories addresses this question: Which film represents the home team? The majority of Academy members live in or near Los Angeles, and actors make up the largest voting contingent. A long-standing grievance of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) is "runaway productions": movies shot abroad, especially in Canada, that ship jobs out of the U.S. Thus there may be some protectionist resentment against Brokeback, which is set in Wyoming and Texas but was shot mostly in Alberta. This would tilt the Best Picture vote to Crash, a low-budget, L.A.-made movie that has--as one of its stars and producers, Don Cheadle, boasted a month ago when the film won the sag ensemble award--74 speaking parts for actors. Hey, hey, U.S.A.!
Paul Haggis, who conceived, co-wrote and directed Crash--and who wrote the script for last year's Oscar winner, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby--dismisses the anti-Canada theory. "This time of year," he says, "everyone tries hard to come up with angles, to make life interesting for us. The truth is that I am thrilled to be nominated in such terrific company. All five films are passion pieces. The filmmakers took big risks, and they all deserve to be rewarded."
If Crash wins on Oscar night next Sunday, Haggis, 52, will have achieved a unique honor: he'll be the first man to write two consecutive Best Pictures. That should make him smile. So should the notion that Crash was helped by an anti-Canada vote--for Haggis is a native of London, Ont.
All of which suggests that the experts have been gazing into the wrong crystal ball. Take into account that Capote, another Best Picture finalist, was shot in Winnipeg, and you'll see that the real question should be: Which Canadian film will win?
That the likeliest contenders for Oscar's grand prize have significant Canadian content is one sign of the sizable role the country plays in Hollywood's most vaunted movies. Another is the high percentage of Oscar-nominated pictures that were launched at last September's Toronto International Film Festival. Brokeback was there, as was Capote. TIFF showcased three of the movies whose stars are up for Best Actor, and all five Best Actress films. It's commonly said that the Oscar season starts in Toronto. This year, by all indications, Canada will be there at the finish.
Haggis has to consider himself lucky that his film has even a chance at Best Picture, considering the odds against it. Crash was shot in late 2003 and early 2004 on a pinchpenny $6.5 million budget--a pretty amazing bang for the buck, given its handsome look, huge cast and dozens of locations. During the shoot, Haggis suffered a heart attack. "I think it was my mom's fault: bad genes," he says wryly. "We stopped shooting for two weeks while I recovered from the surgery. It wasn't that big a deal." When Crash premiered, at the 2004 Toronto fest, it had no distributor and made no special stir. That would come later.
The film's title announces its intentions. It's a collision, an L.A. pileup, of people and prejudices. The dozen-plus major characters include cops, thugs, politicians, strugglers and stragglers, the rich and the poor of all ethnicities--the melting pot that bubbles over in the film's schematic, 36-hour story line. The viewpoint is Manichaean--black and white, if you will--but with a twist. Haggis says not that there are good people and bad people, but that we are all capable of being both. A racist cop (Oscar nominee Matt Dillon) can rudely grope a terrified black woman (Thandie Newton) one night and heroically save her life the next day.
Crash plays this sort of ethical Ping-Pong with most of its characters and with the audience's sympathy. It stretches coincidence and credulity, but it is less a realistic picture than an updated morality play. The people in it are archetypes if you like the movie, stereotypes if you don't, but creatures seen from above by a compassionate, partially complicit outsider.
That would be Haggis, the Canadian abroad. "After living in L.A. half my life," he says, "I now feel like an outsider in both communities. And that's a good thing in my line of work. With Crash, I thought it important to be a part of that world--because I wanted to look at my fears, my intolerances, not those bad people over there--yet I needed to be far enough away to see what most affluent people in L.A. will tell you doesn't really exist. And I don't mean just affluent white people. Class is a bigger divide here than race."
Cheadle, a producer of the film as well as one of its stars, seconds Haggis' insistence that Crash doesn't play the race card. "To say it is about race is reductive," he says, "and is the problem we have with race in this country. To me, it's really about power--people's fear of losing it and trying to gain it, and what they will do for it."
Crash earned some rave reviews--notably from Roger Ebert, who recently said the movie ranks with the best Dickens novels. He has pegged it to win the top Oscar. Other reviews read like hate mail. Fueled in part by that stark critical contrast, Crash became, as Cheadle puts it, "the quintessential watercooler movie. It also gave people a way into a discussion that most people don't want to reference. No one wants to say, 'You know I was yelling at this Chinese guy in the store the other day ... ' or 'This person called me a name.' But you can say, 'You know that scene in Crash where that woman got mad about the Latino locksmith? What do you think was going on with that?'" That incendiary ambivalence is what makes Crash enthralling to some, infuriating to many. Anyway, it sold tickets, $53 million worth (roughly eight times its cost) and kept people talking and thinking. The Academy's L.A. voters are still doing both; that's why the brash Crash might win over the more taciturn (and artful) Brokeback.
At year's end, Crash earned no major critics' prizes, not even a Golden Globe nomination for best picture. (Not since 1983 has a film won the top Oscar without a Globe citation.) But Lions Gate, the indie distributor that picked Crash up, sent out an astonishing 130,000 dvds of the film, rightly figuring that anyone who saw it would, at least, not forget it. The tactic paid off with the SAG award and Oscar nominations for Best Picture and for Haggis as director and writer (with Bobby Moresco).
Two years ago, Haggis was a successful but anonymous TV writer embarking on his first theatrical feature and suffering a heart attack for his pains. Now this Canadian Angeleno is the insider's outsider. Come next Sunday night, the man without a country could be the toast of two of them.
--Reported by Sonja Steptoe