‘Crash’

Car jackings, explosions, shootings, arguments, robberies, loveless sex and political maneuvering keep viewers engrossed.

By: Bob Brown

Thandie Newton (left) and Matt Dillon are among the people affected by a Los Angeles car accident in Crash.

   Not much has changed in Los Angeles since Rodney King uttered the immortal words, "Can’t we all just get along?" It seemed like a sensible request, following the riots in South Central L.A., and about as effective as "All we are saying is, ‘Give peace a chance.’" The city’s ethnic tensions and prejudices bubbling just beneath the surface could erupt anytime. It’s not unusual to see skycams or random video trained on uniformed officers beating a "perp."
   Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby) directs this film about those tensions, based on his original screenplay. Having lived in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, he was surprised when, "one night, while coming out of a video store in my neighborhood, I was car-jacked at gunpoint. That event, a collision of two worlds that normally don’t intersect, forced me out of my complacency."
   He wanted to consider his attackers as people with lives and problems of their own. "I became acutely aware of my own urban isolation," he said. With this film he hopes to explore intolerance as a larger societal problem, especially after Sept. 11. So the movie has a lot of pointed messages to deliver. It’s like watching a car wreck. You rubberneck as you try to get back into the stream of normal life. Meanwhile, it upsets decorum. Yet it’s often funny. It makes you think. But it somehow justifies behaviors without excusing or explaining them.
   A diverse cast and intertwining plots deliver these messages in 113 minutes. Depth? This film hasn’t the time. It serves up quantity. One of those messages is that stereotypes are unjust. Another is that Americans hurt themselves by being ignorant of cultures other than their own. How ironic, since this country is founded on the "melting pot" myth. (When things melt together, they become indistinguishable — but who can claim to be the mold for "American"?) Yet another message is that our socio-economic divide breeds corrosive suspicion. What you see is not what you get.
   The event that kicks off the film, and to which the plot circles back, is a fender bender on a Los Angeles street. Stuck in the traffic pile up are two of L.A.’s finest, Graham (Don Cheadle) and his partner, Ria (Jennifer Esposito). Lest you miss the heavy-handed messaging that will pile up as the story progresses, Graham’s voice-over sets the tone. In other cities, people walk and brush into each other. There’s a sense of touch. "In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass," Graham says. He suggests that a crash is a kind of surrogate touching.
   The plot flashes back to the previous day and in succession are introduced a series of characters and events that set our expectations. The film’s publicity lays them out: "A Brentwood housewife (Sandra Bullock) and her D.A. husband (Brendan Fraser). A Persian store owner. (Shaun Toub)… An African-American television director and his wife (Terence Dashon Howard and Thandie Newton). A Mexican locksmith (Michael Peña). Two car-jackers (Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges). A rookie cop (Ryan Phillippe and his mentor partner, played by Matt Dillon). A middle-aged Korean couple (Greg Joung Paik and Alexis Rhee)…" and so many more, all with speaking parts.
   With so many troubled people bumping up against each other’s lives, the film resembles Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. There’s no central event to tether them (say a high-rise fire or a terrorist takeover). What keeps them all in line is sheer coincidence. Just when we’ve figured out that Officer Ryan (Dillon) is a typically abusive and racist L.A. cop, we see his anguish and his soft side, his heroic and self-sacrificial sides. When we’re sure we know his rookie partner Hansen (Phillippe) is a good guy who abhors the worst of the L.A.P.D., we find out he’s got issues.
   Some characters come on as threatening and are turned around by the sheer force of deus ex machina. No time to waste figuring out what drives these people, however. There are too many stereotypes to set up and debunk to spend much time building real characters.
   After a while, you begin to expect the unexpected. Unfortunately, the characters are like coins with two sides, one black, one white. You’re presented with one side or the other. But there’s never much nuance. On the other hand, you won’t be thinking about it, what with all the action — car jackings, explosions, shootings, arguments, robberies, loving hugs, loveless sex, political maneuvering, professional CYA, smuggling of various kinds — these keep you engrossed.
   The more annoying factors include a bloated musical score that underlines each appropriate emotion (in case you aren’t paying attention) and some stilted acting (Bullock and Fraser come to mind). The best performance is by Don Cheadle, who plays the most rounded character.
   I suspect this movie won’t make a dent in the minds of those who most need to learn from it. L.A. will always be L.A., New York will be New York, and real car wrecks won’t bring anyone together. But in this movie at least, they concentrate the mind wonderfully.
Rated R. Contains language, sexual content and some violence.