The new movie Crash opens and closes with the incident of the title, a relatively minor collision
of the sort that occurs anywhere in the country on any day of the week, in this
case on an unseasonably cold evening in Los Angeles in December. As the long
flashback that constitutes the body of the picture shows, this particular crash
results from a remarkably complicated series of events that in one way or
another draws a large number of people into confrontations of varying levels of
violence.
Everything in Crash
— action, characters, themes — revolves around the enduring,
fundamental American dilemma of race in all its manifestations. The initial
automobile accident, for example, almost immediately explodes into an exchange
of ethnic taunts between a Chinese and a Hispanic woman; when two young African
Americans carjack the District Attorney’s SUV, the victim is more concerned
about his political standing in the black community than about prosecuting the
crime; a bigoted cop (Matt Dillon) pulls a black couple over for the sheer fun
of it, bullying the husband, a successful television director, and groping the
wife simply to assert his authority and work out his malice; a Mexican
locksmith attracts suspicion in one situation and nearly dies in another merely
because of his nationality.
The constant sense of racial enmity and distrust
that permeates just about every level of the world of the film results in fear,
hatred, and often, violence. It explores with real sensitivity the consequences
of the uneasy tensions of modern urban life, the ubiquitous presence of guns,
the threat of injury or death, suggesting a sense of prolonged and inescapable
anxiety, as if no one can ever escape the dangerous business of simply living
in America in our time.
At the same time, the movie also demonstrates the
familiar, sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic politicizing of contemporary race
relations. To counter the possibility of alienating his black constituency
through being a crime victim, the D.A. decides to give an award to a
dark-skinned fireman, but then learns that the man is not only not black, but
is in fact an Iraqi named Saddam, not exactly the best choice to boost his
political career. When a white cop shoots a black cop who’s dealing drugs, the
prosecutors pressure another black detective (Don Cheadle) into covering up
evidence, a profound betrayal of justice and principle, again in order not to
exacerbate racial tensions.Â
The structure of Crash creates its tension and violence, but also generates its intellectual and
emotional content, so that architecture in a sense becomes meaning. The dozen
or so assorted characters — black, white, Chinese, Latino, Middle Eastern —
who occupy the foreground of the movie all end up encountering each other in
some way, colliding, intersecting, linked through the nexus of race and the
capricious currents of coincidence.
Ultimately, the picture suggests, we are all
connected, for the most part, as it turns out, in our fear, pain, and
loneliness, and the terrible mischancing of human action, for which the script
offers little in the way of solution.
Now and then some characters achieve a kind of
diluted redemption, mostly again through sheer chance, and the odd, random
possibilities submerged beneath the surface of ordinary life. Matt Dillon’s
racist cop rescues the woman he had harassed from a burning car, then resumes
his usual racial hostility even while attempting to alleviate his sick father’s
suffering; her husband, the TV director, helps one of the carjackers avoid
arrest, which enables the crook to perform something like an honorable act. On
the other hand, another character’s gesture of kindness and simple decency goes
disastrously wrong, ending in death and inconsolable sorrow.
The large ensemble cast includes a number of quite
recognizable performers, including not only Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, and
Matt Dillon, but also a really big star, the glamorous Sandra Bullock. Perhaps
because they must share screen time with a great many people, the actors
generally behave with competence, playing their parts within the constraints of
their characters and the demands of the intricate plot.
The location, the size of the cast, and the
complexity of the action recall Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, which may provide the model for Crash; with more judicious editing, and quicker cutting, Paul
Haggis might have equaled Altman, but in fairness, he comes very close in an
honest, complex, and sometimes painful examination of one of the great American
subjects.
Crash(R) is playing at
Canandaigua Theatres, Cinemark Tinseltown, Culver Ridge Cinemas, Little
Theatres, Pittsford Plaza.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2005.
