director
Paul Haggis
screenwriters
Paul Haggis
Bobby Moresco
story by
Paul Haggis
producers
Don Cheadle
Paul Haggis
Mark R. Harris
Robert Moresco
Cathy Schulman
Bob Yari
cinematographer
James Muro
music
Mark Isham
editor
Hughes Winborne
cast
Sandra Bullock (Jean)
Don Cheadle (Graham)
Matt Dillon (Officer Ryan)
Jennifer Esposito (Ria)
William Fichtner (Flanagan)
Brendan Fraser (Rick)
Terrence Howard (Cameron)
Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges (Anthony)
Thandie Newton (Christine)
Ryan Phillippe (Officer Hanson)
Larenz Tate (Peter)
Keith David (Lt. Dixon)
Shaun Toub (Farhad)
Loretta Devine (Shaniqua)
Michael Pena (Daniel)
Bahar Soomekh (Dorri)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 113m
u.s.
release: 5/6/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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In Los Angeles as seen in movies
-- well, the serious ones, anyway -- everything seems to be about
disconnection. It's as if the writers and directors who live
there want to impress the rest of the world with the dark side
of such a legendarily lightheaded city. The latest multicharacter
drama to pump up the tensions between the aristocracy and the
groundlings (each represented by a variety of races), Paul Haggis'
Crash enters theaters with an unusually high level of candid
rhetoric and an equal level of do-gooder impulse. The movie (not
to be confused with David
Cronenberg's 1996 oddity) is often very fine, and a somber
yet supple film like this, coming as it does near the beginning
of Stupidity Season at the movies, may strike many critics as
a revelation. But don't let yourself get carried away by the
raves: Crash is solid but no masterpiece.
There are rich white people
(Brendan Fraser as a district attorney, Sandra Bullock as his
perpetually angry wife) and rich black people (Terrence Howard
as a director, Thandie Newton as his mercurial wife). There are
white cops (racist Matt Dillon, good-hearted Ryan Phillippe)
and black cops (troubled detective Don Cheadle, cheerfully cynical
lieutenant Keith David). There are Latinos who look like trouble
but aren't (locksmith Michael Pena, festooned with scary tattoos
but actually a devoted husband and dad) and blacks who don't
look like trouble but are (Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris"
Bridges as two carjackers). There is a hot-headed Iranian store
owner (Shaun Toub) and his level-headed daughter (Bahar Soomekh).
Crash sets all these people bouncing off each other during
the course of one unusally cold Los Angeles day and watches the
racial sparks fly, just as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing
did on a sidewalk-melting day in New York.
The difference between Crash
and other depressed L.A. films (Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia,
Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand
Canyon) is that it focuses entirely on race -- its tensions,
its stereotypes, its misunderstandings. Crash is a tighter
film than any of those. Writer/director Haggis, who also wrote
Clint Eastwood's Million
Dollar Baby, somehow manages to get his characters
doing and saying unconscionable things while still keeping us
involved in their fates. Matt Dillon's cop, who seems at first
glance a racist pig, develops shadings that help us understand
him, if not excuse him. Likewise, we understand why Terrence
Howard's bourgeois director, egged on by his wife's withering
disdain of his manhood, comes close to throwing everything away
when his path crosses with two of the other characters, who don't
know or care that he had a traumatic run-in with Dillon the night
before.
Crash relies a little too much on coincidence for
my taste. It's as if Haggis, seeing how disconnected the characters
are, set out to connect them by force, and sometimes the people
seem like pawns, or placards making instructive points (see,
not all Iranians are bad-tempered; not all Latinos
are hoodlums). Don Cheadle has the movie's most complexly drawn
role, a worn-down detective who can't believe his ears when a
white cop (William Fichtner) wants to cover up the fact that
three black cops recently shot dead by a white cop may have been
corrupt. In a similar plot thread, Ryan Phillippe's young, idealistic
cop wants to report Dillon's racist behavior and is told by his
black supervisor (Keith David) to shut up about it. The interesting
stuff in Crash takes place between cops of various races
and backgrounds (including Cheadle's girlfriend Jennifer Esposito,
a cop of mixed Latin heritage).
The rest of the movie sometimes
works, sometimes doesn't. It may be bracing to hear Miss Congeniality
snarl and drop an F-bomb, but Sandra Bullock's character feels unresolved,
as does Thandie Newton's brittle victim of Dillon's racism. (The
women in the movie get short shrift; Crash concerns itself
chiefly with male torments and dilemmas. The Iranian's wife, for instance, is played by Star Trek: The Next Generation's Marina Sirtis, though you'd never know it, since she's cloaked in traditional head garb and has almost no lines.) The outcome of the
conflict between the Iranian store-owner and the Latino locksmith
feels awfully forced, and does nothing, by the way, to dispel
the stereotype of Middle Eastern men as violently uncomprehending
ranters. (It also begs the question of why his daughter was worried
about whether his gun had been stolen if she herself selected
the bullets in it. That'll make more sense if you see the film.)
Crash has just enough powerful and delicate moments to
rank it among the best of the season, but consider its competition.
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