Dangerous intersections ...

Rating: 5/10 (13 May 2005)

In Paul Haggis' powerful, yet artificial film, CRASH, characters who are introduced as being "bad" eventually do something good to let us know that they are all really quite human. And people who we are introduced to us as being "good" invariably do something bad, so that, well, we know that they are really quite human too. There is a logic to that, both from a literary and a humanistic point of view, but one gets the idea that Haggis wrote the screenplay with a scorecard at hand to make everything balance out just right. No one is too racist, no one is too mean, and certainly no one is too nice. And nobody in the audience will get too offended.
CRASH is part of what is becoming a film sub-genre, the L.A. City of Strangers soap opera. Like its predecessors, Lawrence Kasdan's GRAND CANYON, Robert Altman's SHORT CUTS and Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA, the film jumbles together an odd cross section of Los Angelenos whose lives crisscross and connect, some only by the finest of threads. These films advance the same thesis: that the City of (Fallen) Angels is a cold, uninviting city where people touch each other only by chance; their superficial lives become interconnected, but almost against everybody's will. These films are less cohesive epics than randomly juggled short stories. Indeed, that is what Altman's SHORT CUTS is, a collection of unrelated Raymond Carver short stories forcibly spliced into a single bleak reality.
Like the more upbeat GRAND CANYON, CRASH uses race as a catalyst for drama, but unlike Kasdan's film, there are precious few inklings of optimism. The film's observation that everyone is at least a little bit racist is delivered with little subtlety; they all wear their bigotry on their sleeves. One is reminded of a scene in Spike Lee's JUNGLE FEVER where a waitress expresses her disapproval of an interracial couple with a loud and embarrassingly inappropriate tirade in the middle of the crowded restaurant. Haggis, like Lee, sees racism as being far more blatant then it really is and over vocalizes his characters' beliefs. Sometimes a roll of the eyes or a facial expression says more than a long-winded rant -- but, of course, that isn't nearly as dramatic. Some of the scenes in CRASH seem to have been written in all-caps, boldface, underlined and punctuated with multiple exclamation points. Used sparingly, such heightened drama can jar the viewer; used repeatedly it only rings uncomfortably false.
Apparently, the goal of the film is to debunk racist stereotypes, but to do so the film first presents those stereotypes as a given. Unlike, say MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON, another film with pointedly multi-ethnic casting, CRASH doesn't ignore racial stereotypes, it presents them and then tries to defy them in a way that only ends up confirming them. Once established, the overt stereotypes linger: It is a politically correct backhanded sort of racism to define characters solely by their race or ethnicity or gender and then pretend that it doesn't really matter.
Haggis' background is in episodic TV ("thirtysomething," "L.A. Law," etc.) and it shows. CRASH is meted out in little bite-sized vignettes as it focuses on a group whose lives keep intertwining in an unrealistic, melodramatic way. In soap opera fashion, his mosaic of seemingly random occurrences all come together with far too many clumsy coincidences designed to stun us with unexpected irony. The effect is sometimes remarkably poignant, yet, when all the stories build to ironic twists, that irony becomes ineffective, diluted by its own calculated obviousness. The film ends with most of the stories unresolved, supposedly suggesting an attempt to mirror reality, yet even the messiness of its non-conclusion seems just too neatly contrived. One expects it to fade to black as the announcer invites us to stay tuned for scenes from next week's episode. It is a comfortable and not particularly daring way to tell a story.
Yet, the film has an undeniable power to it. The actors manage to give intense and not always flattering performances that risk but never achieve caricature; no doubt contained by the relatively smallness of each part, the "special guest star" actors punch home the symbolic value of their parts and fade into the ensemble before revealing their characters' shallowness. Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Ryan Phillippe, Matt Dillon and Thandie Newton stand out, as does rapper Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, playing with nice irony someone who hates rap because it is degrading to black people.
Yet, rather than having the flavor of a MAGNOLIA or a SHORT CUTS, the story plays out like a grim politically correct "Love Boat." It's more glib than gritty. As a cultural mosaic, the film is more of a clash than a crash. The individual elements are intriguing and well made; but, when seen as a whole, the effort to make it all mesh into a complete mural seems artificial. There are far too many coincidences in far too short of a time. Haggis the director does just fine, but Haggis the writer succumbs to the impulse to make it all fit together in a tidy little package. As such, the jolts are more like fender benders than head-on collisions and the film dents when it tries to devastate.