I'm Not Okay, You're Not Okay

Rating: Null/10 (9 February 2006)

In Paul Haggis's Crash, people are neither good nor evil, but merely stressed-out. The film is a morality play for the era of Dr. Phil; the characters are placed in morally dicey situations by their inability to develop coping skills. In one scene, a racially insensitive cop, played by Matt Dillon (good to know he's still breathing), gets a little too hands-on with the wife (Thandie Newton) of a TV director (Terrence Howard) he's pulled over; his failure to control his impulses at this juncture has something to do with his frustration over his father's illness, and the way he's treated by the secretary at his HMO (the secretary is black, and so are the director and his wife). But this doesn't necessarily make Dillon a bad guy. In a later scene, Dillon rescues Newton from a burning car despite the danger to his own life. Duality of man anyone?
Haggis' point is only-too-obvious: most people are neither good nor bad by nature, but are the product of their circumstances, and are therefore capable of great heroism as well as great ugliness. Dillon takes advantage of Newton because the opportunity presents itself, because being a cop has made him arrogant, because his outrage at being mistreated by a black woman makes him feel justified in taking out his anger at another black woman (such is the essence of racism). But when he climbs inside the crashed car and finds Newton there, a completely different, self-sacrificing impulse overtakes him. At no other time during Crash does the film become so thematically crystalline. We're all in this together, Paul Haggis is saying, whether we want to admit it or not. It makes no difference that we tend to snipe at each other, to be overcome by racial paranoia, to assert ourselves out of a sense of authority or privilege, or just plain everyday pissiness.
The film makes a huge point of humanity's interconnectedness; the plot is essentially a series of unlikely, but thematically necessary, coincidences and chance encounters. Terrence Howard, having been made to feel vulnerable, unmanly and, what's worse, unblack by his wife's mistreatment, is driven to confront a pair of car-jackers, the eminently black Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, the very same wise-cracking thugs who previously jacked a car belonging to D.A. Brendan Fraser and his frantic wife Sandra Bullock, the latter of whom hires a locksmith, Michael Pena, to install new locks in the house, etc., The result of these narrative acrobatics is a film that can often seem blurry in the short-term, but has a focus, a sense of purpose that asserts itself in the long-run. There are undeveloped characters all over the place, situations that seem like they could be interesting but go nowhere, performances that have no chance to acquire shading, yet the movie rises above these shortcomings. Director Paul Haggis has woven his situations together fluidly, and achieved a sometimes electrifying sense of urgency. The pieces may sometimes seem irrelevant by themselves, but they all fit into the mosaic, and contribute to the sense of building meaning.
That being said, there's still a nagging sense of smallness to the proceedings. Maybe it's just the way the movie is structured; despite Haggis's proficiency, his ability to weave the different threads together, the movie can't quite get past feeling like highlights from a mini-series. Crash is like something that played on HBO once, and they cut it into pieces and stitched them together into a movie. One wishes the story had more room to breathe. What would happen if we got to know more about characters like Fraser's D.A., or Bullock's harried wife-of-the-D.A., or Don Cheadle's police detective? Each character plays their role in the larger drama, but something is lost by the lack of elaboration. Vital material seems missing from Crash, which is why, for all its thematic gravity, its hum, it ends up feeling like an exercise in clever plot mechanics and not an organic piece of storytelling. It's not a morality play in the way a Dardenne Brothers film is; it doesn't achieve the sense of uplift that Rosetta does, or La Promesse. It doesn't have the rawness of a Ken Loach portrayal of small people crushed by forces beyond their control. It's a commercial morality play (even if it's technically an indie). It's plot-heavy, and we're a little overly aware of the stars (it's hard to look at Sandra Bullock and not think, "Somebody's fishing for indie cred."). None of this makes the movie bad; in fact, it's pretty good. But it's good in a certain limiting way, a way that doesn't allow tendrils of meaning to branch off from the central conceit, that doesn't encourage a real sense of complexity. It feels like a big-time movie, and has some real dramatic high-points, but it's a little bit of a smoke and mirrors job. There's something to Crash, just not as much as there could've been.