Haggis finds multi plotting a tricky business

Rating: 7/10 (13 March 2006)

"Multi plotting", in which a group of often disparate characters with their own story lines meet and intermingle, has been a popular film format since at least "Grand Hotel" in 1932. Robert Altman, who was given a special Oscar in 2006 has used this technique to good effect in several of his movies, starting with "Nashville" (1976) and another recent successful exponent was Paul Thomas Anderson in "Magnolia". It's an effective technique but requires a lot of skill to make it work. It has a tendency to put an emotional distance between the audience and the characters, making it harder for viewers to identify with them, and one can finish up feeling one is just observing pond life through a microscope.
In this film, writer/director Paul Haggis, a very experienced TV producer, gives us some well-rounded characters, such as Don Cheadle's amiable black detective, but others, if not cardboard cut-outs are rather flat, such as Sandra Bullock's angry housewife Jean, and her slimy District Attorney husband Rick (Brendan Fraser). Other characters are shameless exercises in audience manipulation, for example Matt Dillon's very well acted white racist LAPD operative who after behaving very badly towards a middle-class couple, saves the wife from a fiery death. Just to press the point home we also discover he is an attentive son to his ailing elderly father (and engaged in a battle over Dad's health insurance cover with an unsympathetic black bureaucrat).
It was difficult to have much sympathy for the Iranian storeowner who was unable to recognise that he, and not the latino locksmith was responsible for making the store easier to burgle. Maybe we would understand him better if we knew, say, that he used to work for the Shah's secret police. There is plenty of tension when he confronts the locksmith with a gun, but once again our emotions are manipulated (via the locksmith's daughter).
Again, the black car-jacking desperados are such obvious dickheads it is difficult to empathise with them also, but the story line is manipulated in such a way as to put them in a different light.
It has to be said most of the acting is first-rate and the story lines are well handled, though there are some loose ends. It was only right at the end I realised that after the first scene (at the crash  no more than a fender bender) that the whole film is in flashback  frankly I thought that was too tricky. Oscar material? Really, no. I haven't seen "Munich" but "Brokeback Mountain", "Capote" and "Goodnight and Good Luck" are all superior in their different ways. So how did it win? Well, more than half the academy live in the LA area and obviously thought the film told it how it is, or how it feels to be an Angelino. As an outsider though, I am at the other end of the microscope.