*Magnolia* without the frogs.

Rating: 3/10 (22 May 2005)

*Crash*, by Paul Haggis, is one of those slice-of-life, twelve-characters-in-search-of-a-connection sort of thing, and, as is usually this case with these type of movies, is rather poorly done. The movie has many antecedents, but the most obvious has to be P.T. Anderson's *Magnolia*. Both movies share an unearned sense of doom, a gloomy tone, overwrought histrionics, and even apocalyptic stuff falling from the sky in Los Angeles (I won't spoil it, but at least there are no frogs in *Crash*).
While *Magnolia* -- itself cribbed from Altman's *Short Cuts* -- tried to sustain its multi-level storyline with a theme about the interconnectedness of humanity even within the spacious confines of suburban L.A., *Crash* takes as its impetus the daily round of racial antipathy seething under the Superpower sheen of American life. Obviously, the latter is a more vital and inherently interesting topic, which makes *Crash* a more inherently interesting movie, probably (but then, what ISN'T better than *Magnolia*?). The movie certainly gets interesting whenever it deigns to follow either Don Cheadle or Matt Dillon (and we are grateful Dillon has been given a decent role -- it's been a while) within its 24-hour time-frame. Tellingly, both Cheadle and Dillon are in law enforcement: the former being a world-weary detective, the latter being a world-weary, racist beat cop. Which leads one to the conclusion that Haggis should have focused his film on how law enforcement contributes to the racial animosity in this country. The side-story, for instance, about the Iranian shopkeeper is merely post-Iraq-War political posturing (count on it, someone accuses him of waging jihad early in the film when he's buying a pistol at a gun store). Rapper Ludicrous, of all people, inveighing against hip-hop dumbing down African-American culture is the worst sort of didactic pontificating, especially when one considers that these slyly racist remarks are put in his mouth by white filmmakers. (Haggis is a lily-white Canadian.) And then there's Sandra Bullock, a spoiled and pampered wife of the D.A., who must endure getting her car jacked by the aforementioned Ludicrous and getting her locks changed by a Mexican guy with a tattoo. Even worse, her Latina housekeeper leaves the dishes in the dishwasher instead of putting them in the cupboards after they're washed. Just how much listening to Bullock complain about housekeepers will contribute to the audience's internal debate about race relations is anybody's guess.
Ironically, *Crash* gets good whenever the racial issues are rendered secondary by good old-fashioned cinematic values. There are at least two terrifically exciting scenes in the movie: the first involves Dillon rescuing Thandie Newton in an overturned car; the second involves bleeding-heart cop Ryan Phillipe (Dillon's former partner) moderating a standoff between Newton's husband and a group of pistol-brandishing LAPD. These scenes are well-staged and intense . . . but then one recalls the massive amount of coincidences that require two cops -- former partners who had a nasty encounter with this same couple the night before -- to come to the rescue of these individuals in different parts of what is one of the largest cities in the world. I suppose one can blame this on the movie's unfortunate structure, but very little about *Crash* is particularly likely, anyway. In a culture that has relegated talk of race to the psychopathic margins, all the frank discussion going on here is grievously unrealistic. One of Cheadle's white superiors -- one of the movie's "good guys", presumably -- even mutters "Black people!" under his breath in Cheadle's presence. Uh, fat chance, Haggis. A true movie about race relations in 2005 in the USA would, of course, never mention the color of someone's skin. But wherever shameless didacticism goes, praise from the tasteless must follow, I guess.
3 stars out of 10. P.S.: It's sadly fitting, given the movie under review, that IMDb's spell-checker is changing "Ludacris" to "Ludicrous". Draw your own conclusions!