Crash
Written by Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco
Directed by Paul Haggis
Lions Gate
2005
Rating:


Not quite the moral failure of "Monster's Ball" but also not approaching the blistering moral triumph of a film like "Bad Day at Black Rock," "Crash" is one of those heal-the-hate movies that tries hard but ends up tripping over its own liberal guilt. The liberal guilt of director-co-writer Paul Haggis (screenwriter of "Million Dollar Baby" and the creator of the television series "Due South" and "EZ Streets") hangs so low, in fact, that he can tie it in a knot, he can tie it in a bow, interconnecting the racist lives of a dozen or so characters whose bigotry will yield an irony-filled 24 hours.

Los Angeles, that hotbed of race relations, also stands as the capital of car crashes because, as Det. Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) muses, "I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something." Despite the sincerity and poeticism of his statement, it quickly rings false. Los Angelinos don't reside in glass-and-steel cages of emotion — they're filled with hate, good will or both according to this movie.

After a brief flash forward that creates unsteady bookends, the movie opens with Anthony and Peter (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and Larenz Tate) voicing their disgust that white people are afraid of them — "If anybody should be scared it's us, the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people" — before carjacking District Attorney Rick Fields (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Jean (Sandra Bullock). Jean, paranoid about another attack, has her locks changed by Daniel Lorca (Michael Peña), and then demands that they be changed again, fearing that the tattooed and Hispanic Daniel is a gangmember. Daniel will later provide his services to Farhad (Shaun Toub), a Persian storeowner and new gun-owner. Det. Waters works a potentially race-related shooting between two officers with his partner Ria (Jennifer Esposito). Meanwhile, racist cop Ryan (Matt Dillon), who's having trouble getting his HMO to treat his father's illness, and his newbie partner Hanson (Ryan Phillippe) pull over black director Cameron Thayer (Terrence Howard) under suspicion of stealing DA Fields' Navigator, and Ryan takes advantage of the situation when he discovers that Christine (Thandie Newton) was performing fellatio on her husband.

By taking "Short Cuts," these plot lines are tied together in ways that are only intermittently compelling and never remotely believable. The brilliant and similar "Magnolia" gets away with its magical realism because the interconnection, not any underlying moral lesson, is the point. "Crash," however, wants to say something important about race relations in L.A. and goes about it using a sledgehammer and a magic wand. Haggis can't have it both ways.

"Magnolia" and "Short Cuts," for all the heft of their running times (both topped the three-hour mark), also always feel urgent and manage to make their subplots gripping. "Crash," at less than two hours, feels like it has filler, or at least plot culs-de-sac. Waters' story, which also involves a wayward brother and a heroin-addicted mother, has the intrigue of "L.A. Confidential" and posits the question of how much black police officers do for their community, but there's frustratingly little to it. An investigation into how black is black enough through Thayer similarly pulls up short. The only thing "Crash" is long on is dialogue, most of which is tremendous, but its shunning of realism undermines the realistic work that needs to be done.

Like "Magnolia" (and more than a little bit like the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode "Amends" and the vapid L.A. catastrophe movie "Volcano"), "Crash" ends with a freak meteorological occurrence set to an Aimee Mann-ish song. It's meant to be a moment of transcendental beauty, but it's an odd choice to blanket L.A. in forgetful precipitation on the way to whitewashing the city's multicultural faces. And that's really the problem with "Crash" — it really wants to say something, but it's completely confused about what.

Posted Sunday, May 22, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/crash