Screenwriter Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby) makes an impressive directorial debut with a telescoping deliberation on American race prejudices as viewed through a lens of day-to-day life in the melting pot of Los Angeles. Haggis rivals Robert Altman’s nimble ability to balance numerous characters across a broad narrative canvas.
Multiple story threads intertwine around a racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his honest partner (Ryan Phillippe), a duo of black car thieves (Larenz Tate and Chris Ludacris Bridges), a Los Angeles District Attorney (Brendan Fraser), his thin-skinned wife Jean (Sandra Bullock) and a sexist police detective (Don Cheadle).
Promising hotshot actor-of-the-moment Terrence Howard is outstanding as Cameron Thayer, a successful television director whose dignity is challenged by his high-maintenance wife (Thandie Newton) and the fascist demands of his social milieu. Crash is a provocative drama that aligns with the socially conscious American theatrical dramaturgy of the 1930s and ‘40s.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Crash is how concealed aspects of characters’ personalities are revealed behind their public facades. As with most people you meet in everyday life, the characters in Crash are not what they verbally announce themselves to be. Ryan (Dillon) is a hardened veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and wears his offensive bigotry on his sleeve. He’s just one rung below Harvey Keitel’s abysmal character in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, with a proneness to abusing his authority at will.
Ryan and his partner Hanson (Phillippe) pull over an SUV driven by a black husband (Howard) whose wife (Newton) happens to be giving him a blowjob. Ryan takes advantage of the situation to sexually humiliate the wife while her husband is forced to tacitly endorse the atrocity as it’s being committed.
The emotionally wrenching scene is characteristic of the high stakes fragments of all-or-nothing drama that play out in unpredictable ways across every subplot of the movie. For all of Ryan’s self-loathing and ignorant disposition, he nonetheless has an overwhelming involuntary urge to help the very people he consciously categorizes as lesser people. Ryan’s atonement for his heinous behavior is among one of the film’s several climaxes and reveals a hidden layer of humanity that purges the venom we’ve become accustomed to.
Haggis skillfully puts just enough additional narrative weight on Ryan’s shoulders that the deeply flawed character serves as the legible protagonist in a movie filled with would-be leading characters.
As the film’s screenwriter, Haggis pays special attention to social context with a realistic ear for dialogue that fluently dips between divergent cultural influences. The Iranian owner of a small retail business possesses such inferior communication skills that his fate seems doomed until his own inferiority serves to redeem him in his assassination attempt against a Latino locksmith that goes awry. A Chinese smuggler of illegal immigrants is struck by an accident that brings instant karma upon him. In each of these subplots the audience is pulled close inside the mind of the characters and positioned within social parameters that delineate the societal confines that each person attempts to function within.
Conclusions that audiences will jump to are repeatedly flipped back upon them so that we are given a different set of options that reflect a myriad of choices beyond the oversimplified form of thought that the American media propagates. Haggis devaluates American media spin in favor of our ability to look around ourselves and look directly into the social ills that relentlessly pound away at our peace of mind as we go through our automobile-obsessed lives. Crash is a movie designed to get people talking, and perhaps even acting outside of the system in a good way. MTW
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