Crash

Crash grapples with important issues - like back pain.

***Note: this review contains spoilers.***

In Crash, Paul Haggis, a first-time director, charts 36 hours in the lives of about a dozen Los Angelinos.

These characters come from a variety of age groups, classes, and racial backgrounds—black, white, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Asian. Haggis ties these disparate characters together through multiple interwoven storylines and a thematic preoccupation with racism.

Despite the complexity of its treatment, the film’s central thesis is straightforward: everyone is capable of racism. The point that no individual, class, or ethnic group is immune is made repeatedly. In fact, the film’s so intent on making this point that it starts to seem programmatic. One character after another—irrespective of history, ethnicity, personality, or circumstance—succumbs to racism. In Crash, it seems, when two people of different racial backgrounds come together, there can only be one result: prejudice and conflict.

As the film progresses, this starts to seem increasingly pat, reductive, and dispiriting. The characters are pawns in a storyline that sees racial division, stereotype, and conflict as an inevitability, which becomes frustrating, particularly when some of this conflict is engineered via unlikely plot twists. Why, you wonder, does the dice have to be so loaded?

Crash’s narrative ingenuity sits oddly with its subject matter. The dialogue, cinematography, and acting all seem to aspire to a realistic depiction of race relations, yet plot implausibility militates against it. For example, when two young black men, Anthony (Chris Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate) are walking down the footpath, an approaching white woman (Sandra Bullock) takes the arm of her husband (Brendan Fraser) because she feels threatened. Anthony notices this and complains about it to Peter. Our sympathies are with the young men, but then, in a flabbergasting twist, they steal the white couple’s car at gunpoint.

This is a neat reversal, subverting audience expectations and sympathies, critiquing racial stereotyping, and then qualifying that critique—all in one dizzying vignette. But as clever as it is, a film that presents itself as a realistic take on racism undermines its own case with tricky plot convolutions of this sort. Sure, the twist is smart, but it’s not believable—it seems to belong in another film, a film with different targets and a different sensibility.

The script, written by Haggis and Robert Moresco, foists a similar sort of twist on the viewer in the storylines involving the two cops. The racist cop, Ryan (Matt Dillon), acts heroically to rescue Christine (Thandie Newton), who he racially abused in a previous incident. This is compelling and interesting, and despite some implausibilities, you’re willing to go along with it. What’s impossible to swallow is this storyline’s corollary, in which the ostensibly non-racist cop, Hanson (Ryan Phillippe), commits a racially motivated murder. Here the script jettisons plausibility and consistent character development in order to close a thematic circle.

Unfortunately, this kind of contrivance and coincidence is the rule, not the exception in Crash. But perhaps some allowances should be made. After all, the plot’s artificiality is, in part, caused by the narrative compression that dealing with multiple characters and storylines in a two-hour film demands. With so many different characters and storylines, the time spent on each is limited. This forces the screenwriter and director to make every detail meaningful, like in a short story. (If a bullet-proof cloak is mentioned, you can rest assured that it’ll feature later in the film.) Even the overly coincidental interweaving of storylines arises partly from the need for narrative economy.

It’s harder to be reconciled to the film’s pessimistic view of racial relations, however. For the most part, Crash seems to see racism not as a potentiality, but as a given. Sure, the racist cop saves a black woman—but only after he’s sexually assaulted her. Sure, the black car thief frees the Asian slaves—but he subjects them to a stream of racist invective while he does so. Compassion and understanding only seem to mitigate the presumption of racism, and that’s what’s so dispiriting.

It's a pity Crash insists on seeing all interactions through just one prism, that of racial conflict—because even in a city as racially combustible as LA, this simply doesn’t seem credible. I wish the film was a little less romanced by the neatness of its own plot symmetries, a little less ready to surrender to what, you imagine, it feels is hardheaded pragmatism on matters of race, an unflinching gaze into the darkest recesses. I left the cinema wishing the film had been as committed to showing what could go right between different races as it was to what could go wrong.

Because if racism is a potentiality in us all, so too are love, empathy, and compassion.

PS: Given all that I’ve just written, it might surprise you to read that I think Crash is an outstanding film. Well, I do. It’s thoughtful, technically accomplished, brilliantly acted and, in some respects at least, extremely well scripted. Yes, it’s calculated to incite. But not mindlessly so. No, I don’t agree with it. But I don’t deny the power and conviction of what it has to say, either. You should go see it, because Crash will, at the very least, get you thinking—even if only to refute what it has to say. Trite, but true. For this reason alone, it’s a 2005 must-see.

-- Hans Fruck