An intense collage of stories set in Los Angeles suburbia.

Rating: 8/10 (21 December 2005)

For the past five years or so, Hollywood has been producing quite a few movies that deal with "character clashes", usually within the backdrop of a large city. In these types of films characters from a variety of backgrounds "clash" together during key points in the film as the result of sporadic, short term conflicts. "Crash" presents a diverse set of characters ranging from street detectives to doctors in a pivotal film that gives us a glimpse of racial tensions and their complexities. The biggest aspect I loved about this movie is that it presented the biases and stereotypes harbored by everyone in Los Angeles without attempting to get at a moral solution to the problem. I think the story specifically attempted to show what people do in unpredictable situations and how they deal with those situations accordingly. By watching this film, the viewer is not subjected to a detailed morality lesson, but instead gets the perspective of all of the characters and how those perspectives conflict with other people in the story.
Among the backdrop of racial tensions, we're also presented with other problems the characters face, and within that context, we seem to understand their motivations a lot better. Some of the main problems presented in the film are of a housewife unhappy with her marriage and herself, a detective that has no idea how to console his mother, and an Iranian family living in the shadow of fear and paranoia.
I'm really glad I got a chance to finally see this because the characters are very impressive in their performances. Also, we see a lot of unexpected twists of fate that turn up at the most inopportune times, thus further fueling the film's effect on the audience. Unfortunately, at the end there were a few obligatory "tear jerker" scenes in the story which I thought were unnecessary and this ultimately identified the film as resembling other Hollywood spawns. However, my final vote is that this movie was gripping, visually impressive, and an awesome work. 8 of 10.