Powerfully done drama

Rating: 10/10 (14 May 2005)

Crash deals with an automobile accident that touches the lives of several people in L.A. Cheadle leads the movie as Detective Graham, who is rear-ended at a crime scene, which kicks off the movie. The rest of the two hours shows us how we got there, following the threads of several different seemingly disconnected lives and showing how in fact they all influence one another without ever meaning to.
Crash does not always come together; it's a little hard to get into because we aren't given anyone to latch onto, and at the start the movie stakes a claim that deep down where they live, everybody's pretty much a prick, more often than not (excepting a character named Daniel, played by Michael Pena). The people we meet are not always sympathetic  in fact Bullock pretty much plays a racist jack-ass  but they are always honest and real, even if they can be unpleasant. Ludicrous in particular is saddled with a character that could have been played as comedy, the young black male who sees an anti-black motivation to everything in the whole world; but in this film, the character comes off as realistic as any other.
Where Crash excels is in betraying your expectations. One person is set up sympathetically, and he turns out to be a jerk; another is set up as a jerk, and he turns out to have a solid core. Not every character is a twist, and not every situation relies on irony, but there's enough there to make a central theme in the film. In lesser hands this could have played out poorly, but Crash is so deftly orchestrated that there are some moments of dramatic payoff in this film that most movies can never hope to achieve; and some of them, you don't even see coming, which is even more welcome.
Bullock's obnoxious character is given a brief moment so strong toward the end that it brought tears to my eyes; likewise a speech given by Cameron, a black TV producer (played expertly by Terrence Howard) to Ludicrous' thug character at the end is very, very strong. Ryan Phillipe has a few excellent scenes, though his is a lesser role than some of the others. But the two most powerful scenes in the movie spring from directly opposing desires in the viewer  one an act you desperately don't want to see happen, and one you do.
Matt Dillon plays a racist cop who is forced to come to the aid of a woman (Thandie Newton) he harassed; the initial scenes with their characters don't play out that strongly, but when they confront one another in literally a life-and-death situation, the emotion is so powerful it leaps off the screen at you; probably five minutes of some of the best film-making I have ever seen. Likewise, the one wholly positive character in the film, Daniel, captures our sympathy almost at once, and his scenes with his daughter are tender and unaffected, very natural. When suddenly she is put into danger, the viewer can't help but react strongly (several people in the theater gasped audibly); what happens there, again, is simply brilliant, brilliant film-making, drama at its finest, reaching off the screen and touching us where we live.
Crash offers no easy answers, and everyone in the film must come to some difficult realization about themselves. It's not always an easy film to digest, and it plays with some ugly truths about people, America, and our society. But its very lack of a pat ending, its very unwillingness to wrap up the story in any sort of convenient way, make it a much stronger film. Though not a flawless piece of work, Crash is so strong in so many areas that even though we have more than six months left, it's hard to contemplate a better film being released this year. So often you hear ads proclaim "one of the most powerful dramas of the year." Well, those words would be true of this film. I don't know if Crash is playing everywhere, but you owe it to yourself to see this in the theaters if you can  though the drama is so intense that it will still play well on DVD, I would imagine.