Through a glass darkly.

Rating: 7/10 (2 April 2006)

What "Traffic" did for drugs, "Crash" tries to do for race relations, and to a lesser extent succeeds.
The crash of the title, presumably, refers to the offensive behavior of ethnic groups and races to one another. But behavior must be justified, and the justification here (as in life) evolves from the prism through which we view society. As our sensitivity to tribal allegiances is heightened, so we tend to heighten it even more in a kind of vicious circle at the end of which the evil nature of the "other" can simply be taken for granted.
The movie does a pretty good job of showing how this distorted vision evolves, sometimes out of practically nothing. I guess I'll give an illustration of what I'm getting at. I'm white and my friend was African-American. This was in Philadelphia in the early 70s, when urban crime was rampant. On payday we cashed our checks, first at his bank, then at mine. I stood around in his bank awkwardly waiting for him, nervously imagining that the armed guards were eying me suspiciously as a potential bank robber, since I seemed to have no business being there. I said nothing about it to Bill because it seemed silly. Then we went through the same business at my bank except that this time Bill was left to loll around. When we were outside, he told me, "You know, I think those guards were all keeping an eye on me because I'm black." Racism, as it's usually called, is probably our most profound social problem and it is rarely talked about because it makes for clumsy conversation between members of opposite groups. But, as this movie makes clear, the prejudice is not entirely without justification. Prejudice seldom is. Abrasions, major and minor, build up animosities until individuals explode with anger or reach too quickly for the gun.
"Crash" gives us a good picture of the way prejudice insinuates itself into our lives, often without our realizing it. Not that the movie is flawless. Compared to "Traffic," the seams show. The interlocking stories are rather mechanically spelled out for us. And instead of focusing on three stories, there are multiple narratives involving -- let me think -- whites, Iranians, African-Americans, Cambodians, Chinese, and Mexican-Americans. Absolutely nobody gets along with anybody else. And there is no figure who is able to transcend these animadversions. Don Cheadle could do it in "Traffic" but his character can't do it here. And Sandra Bulluck is in this movie for reasons not immediately apparent to a viewer. The ending of the movie is hyped by a lugubrious score that shows us all of the major figures suffering, although we need neither the score nor the montage to tell us the fate of characters that the movie has spent all of its time spelling out in detail for us.
Yet the movie carries more weight than most. It's more literal than it needs to be but its message is so important that it can't, and shouldn't be, ignored.
Where does this abominable sentiment come from, this racism that Gunnar Myrdal saw right of the boat or the bat? Maybe the answer is as sad as the movie's ending. "We have seen the enemy," said Pogo, "and he is us."