"Magnolia" with racism instead of frogs

Rating: 5/10 (28 May 2005)

"Crash" has aspirations of being an operatic saga of racial resentment and misplaced aggression. With its large cast of characters whose stories occasionally intersect and bounce off one another like bumper cars, it recalls "Magnolia" and "2 Days In the Valley," but seriously lacks the substance to fill out the heft of its ambitions. A film this dedicated to race needs to have something urgent to say, but "Crash" is mostly content with a series of broad sketches, injected with some truly troubling notions of racism and its effects.
We're introduced to a large assembly of characters, most of whom go unnamed, or whose names are mentioned only in passing. We're all victims and all aggressors, the film is telling us; what do names matter? There's the district attorney and his wife who are carjacked by two black thugs who wax poetic about constantly being taken for thugs. The honest Chicano locksmith always seems to incur his customers' wrath in spite of his solid work. There's the rageful racist cop who, after seeing his father denied medical coverage by a black HMO receptionist, takes it out on a couple of innocent, affluent black motorists. "Crash" keeps its huge cast in check only by treating them as ciphers. The only notable attribute displayed by any one of them is to be a victim or perpetrator of misplaced racial anger, and in many cases both.
What disturbs about "Crash" is its assertion that race continues to divide us not through the enduring power and harm of stereotypes and misconceptions, but by how true such stereotypes often are. Are we by now so conditioned with knee-jerk rejections of such types that we've become blind to the dangers they underscore? There are several "but what about?" moments that give doubt to the film's intentions. Of course the vast majority of young black men are not gangbangers and criminals, but what about the characters played by Ludicrous and Larenz Tate, who are? Clearly most Caucasian LAPD patrolmen are not Mark Furman-like white devils, but what about Matt Dillon, who thrills to molesting a black woman in front of her husband at a traffic stop? I don't think "Crash" wants us to take such incidents at face value, but it lingers on them long enough to suggest that, well, black thugs and white racist cops ARE the problem, rather than the tragic symptoms of far deeper sociological pathologies.
Ultimately, the film hopes to illustrate that we're all guilty, yet capable of redemption. While many of its more loathsome characters find some measure of humanity, several of the more upstanding have, by the end, fallen victim to their own unsuspected prejudices. It's difficult to care much one way or the other, though. Such thinly-drawn characters have put nothing at stake for us. Their sins and redemptions, no matter how grandiose, feel distant and hollow. In trying to be all things to all people, "Crash" ends up being little of anything. It's on to something with the uncomfortable questions about race relations upon which it touches, but is just trying to swallow whole a subject that demands small bites, and a lot of chewing.