Remarkable take on the clash of cultures in L.A,

Rating: 10/10 (5 February 2007)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
Crash was a surprise winner of the Best Picture Oscar for 2006. It's a message movie and the Academy obviously liked the message. The message is that racial intolerance is untenable if you really stop to think about it and see people from some point of view other than your own.
What makes this work is a brilliant conception and adroit direction by John Haggis, a believable script by Haggis and Robert Moresco, and fine film editing by Hughes Winborne. All three won Oscars. They were able to preach, as it were, without preaching. By putting people in positions of racial and ethnic irony, they show us that racial prejudice is absurd. We see events that could happen to anyone regardless of race or ethnicity. We also see that supposed stereotypical behavior that we may hold against another race or ethnic group is sometimes exactly what we do themselves. The movie points to the truth that everybody is prejudice in one way or another.
The story itself is about several people whose lives accidentally come together ("crash") in the ethnically and racially diverse, sprawling City of the Angels. There are two young black guys who could pass for UCLA students (they think since they're in the Westwood area) who hijack the SUV of an LA politico, Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) as he and his wife Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock) are driving home. There's a double irony here because one of the guys is complaining that people are afraid of them because they're black in a white neighborhood even as they move toward the hijacking! Later we meet the mother of one of the black guys whose brother Graham (Don Cheadle) is an LAPD detective who tells his mother he's bedding a white woman, Ria (Jennifer Esposito) who he thinks is Mexican, oblivious of the fact that her parents are from Puerto Rico and El Salvador! There's quite a bit of this ironic confusion about race and ethnicity in the movie, the point being people tend to see others as stereotypes of skin color and language without really being aware of who that person is as an individual. A Persian shopkeeper is thought of as Arab. Hindus are thought to be Muslim. Thais are Chinese. Ignorance is the basis of racial and ethnic prejudice, is part of Haggis's message. And he's right.
One of the most beautiful sequences in the movie begins when Shereen (Marina Sirtis) buys some bullets in a gunshop for her father, the Persian shopkeeper. (Pay attention to those bullets!) Later we see Daniel (Michael Pena) talking to his daughter Lara (Ashlyn Sanchez) who is hiding under her bed because she is afraid of the bullets that used to go off in her old neighborhood. Daniel gives her his invisible, impenetrable cloak to wear to protect her, taking it off and putting it around her. Later when the Persian shopkeeper comes hunting Daniel because he thinks Daniel tore up his store, Lara runs to protect her dad who no longer has the impenetrable cloak! I won't tell you want happens. You have got to see the sequence yourself.
Matt Dillon plays a racially prejudice cop who could pass for a young and less sophisticated real life ex-LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman of O. J. Simpson trial infamy. He is the central character in another interesting sequence beginning with his groping shakedown of a black man's wife.
The stories meld together in a way that reflects how Los Angeles is a cultural melting pot--or is it a salad bowl? The stories that intertwine bring out the underlining preconceptions and prejudices of the people of that salad bowl (or melting pot) in a way that is more effective than a dissertation or documentary might be. Yes, there is some contrivance, but I think it's fair to write that off as poetic license.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this movie is that although it won the Best Picture Oscar it only cost about $6-million to make. It's one of the most original films I've seen in quite a while and one of the most effective.