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Film

Brace yourself for 'Crash'

Director Paul Haggis shows us that anyone is capable of prejudice - and acting on it. Can you spot yourself onscreen?

By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 5, 2005

Each culture blended into America's melting pot has a race card to play. Director and co-writer Paul Haggis shuffles the deck in Crash, a multicharacter study along the lines of Short Cuts and Magnolia, in which everyone is a star of his or her own story and a supporting player - sometimes unwittingly - in others.

This is one of those rare occasions when a film deserves a longer running time. The topic of racial conflict and suspicion sprawls with too much importance, too many possibilities to cover in only 100 minutes. But Crash deserves credit for realizing it doesn't have all the answers; Haggis prefers to raise moral and ethical questions to be considered after the show. That alone makes it an exciting movie experience.

Haggis, an Oscar nominee for his Million Dollar Baby screenplay, struggles mightily to make individual characters speak for perhaps millions of others like them. The film's structure, conceived by Robert Altman in the 1970s and polished by Paul Thomas Anderson in recent years, is unavoidable yet prevents Crash from fully exploring its theme that we're all blinded by color in one way or another.

The film begins with a car accident, Haggis' and co-writer Bobby Moresco's symbol for the way people collide socially, sometimes in harmless fender benders that should be taken as warnings, and other times with massive, tragic, irreversible results.

The driver is Graham (Don Cheadle), a black Los Angeles detective called to some kind of death scene with his Puerto Rican partner, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), with whom he shares an edgy interracial affair. The crime scene's circumstances will be clear when the movie comes full circle.

Cut to Anthony (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate), two young black men who look out of place walking along fashionable Rodeo Drive. They comment on the fears white people have seeing them, arguing that they are the ones who should be scared. Then they confirm white America's fears, carjacking an expensive SUV owned by Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Jean (Sandra Bullock).

We follow Rick and Jean home, where his position as district attorney and her fear create deeper problems. Rick tries public relations maneuvers to capitalize on the incident without offending black voters. Jean isn't diplomatic at all, loudly accusing the Latino locksmith Daniel (Michael Pena) changing their locks of being a gang member who will sell copies of their keys to his "homies."

Soon, we may think Daniel is the most upright personality in the entire movie, after tense confrontations with Farhad, an Arab man (Shaun Toub) whose grocery store is vandalized by bigots. Fahrad thinks the only thing that will protect him is a gun. The beauty of Crash is that we may agree at first. Then, that weapon is used in a shocking development that puts us on the side of someone we might have seen as a bad guy before.

Crash detours into the home of Cameron (Terrence Howard) and Christine (Thandie Newton), an upwardly mobile couple privately wondering if they've sold out their culture. They cross paths with LAPD officers Ryan (Matt Dillon), an unabashed racist, and rookie Hanson (Ryan Phillippe), who oozes white guilt. A traffic stop leads to a degrading experience that haunts them all, especially when separate traffic crises bring the antagonists together again.

Those coincidences rob Crash of a bit of its power. But that's the tradeoff Haggis makes to get so many viewpoints into his story. It takes a lot of convenient twists to show everyone's good and bad sides. We're all capable of prejudice, and just as capable of doing something about it, positively or negatively. That's a bold, ambitious direction for any film to take, in times when many viewers see movies as simply entertainment.

Haggis and Moresco continue the domino effect these characters have on each other to the point where clear resolution is practically impossible. But that's something like racism in the real world, where best and worst intentions can be expressed and misinterpreted either way.

Crash is a movie with problems, but those simply make Haggis' vision, his clear reflection of us, so powerful.

GRADE: B-plus

DIRECTOR: Paul Haggis

CAST: Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe, Thandie Newton, Larenz Tate, Terrence Howard, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Jennifer Esposito, Michael Pena

SCREENPLAY: Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco

RATING: R; harsh profanity, violence, sexual situations, mature themes

RUNNING TIME: 100 min.

[Last modified May 3, 2005, 14:10:06]