A fantastic movie -- important, if not perfect

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2007)

In modern day LA a group of urban professionals, gangsters and their significant-others struggle with life, racism and relationships during a highly overheated 36 hours.
The technique of Crash (the directorial product of Million Dollar Baby author Paul Haggis) is to flip between stories and characters like a horse fly buzzing around looking for fresh blood to suck before moving on to the next victim. Sometimes we don't stick around for the aftermath - as if it can be taken as read or presumed. Not original and in terms of plot development, but nevertheless very moving.
Its major fault is that seeks to ring maximum emotion of the scenes at the price of plausibility or even clear reason. For example, I have no idea why Sandra Bullock's character suddenly saw the light and hugs her maid. To give but one example.
What I like best is that nobody quite comes away clean. Nobody gets a full clean bill of health. Even honest cop Don Cheadle (the nearest thing to the main star) describes his partner as "Mexican" when her parentage is not actually from Mexico. In LA - this movie says - very few people have time for detail or have much consideration for the feelings of others.
Housewife Sandra Bullock is spoilt and presumes that the tattooed locksmith is a gang-banger - when he is not, he is a loving father. She chastises the Latin American housekeeper for not putting the cups away without seeing how much she does for them and what she provides.
Politician husband Brendan Fraiser only wants to spin everything to his own advantage - even being car jacked!
Cheadle is a cop with troubled blood relatives and a seen-it-done-it attitude to life. In this movie even cops are not all one and the same team.
In other stories gangsters discuss the racism and stereotyping they help create and a storekeeper doesn't understand enough English to comprehend what a fellow tradesman is trying to say. And so it goes on.
LA is portrayed fairly as a bag of races, creeds and winners/losers. But given the USA is a free country why do they chose to live there? Have they no choice? They are people with no general love of their fellow man - strangers, screw 'em, this movie seems to be saying. Nor does the movie allow you to relax - good people do bad things and bad people do good things. The movie rips away your normal security blanket.
The snow (in LA?) and the cinematography play to make it seem like a kind of dream. Or even an extended "serious" pop video. The real world - but not quite. A pastiche of the real LA and the real LA experience, but not the real one.
I rate Crash one of the most important films of the new millennium. It asks questions (although without answering them all) about why America cannot settle down. We - in the UK - are heading towards having a capital where only half the resident population are white. And I knew London when it was as white as any major city in the world and yet it doesn't have this level of tension and animosity. Is this because you cannot - as the film opening line makes out - live totally behind steel and glass here?
While this film seems to split people - I am glad it won the Best Picture Oscar. This is adult cinema in a world of cartoons. Let us hope that for director Paul Haggis good things come in threes and he has one more classic up his sleeve...