Absorbing but doesn't hold up to examination

Rating: 2/10 (16 June 2005)

In Hollywood movies L.A. is most commonly used as just a convenient location for stories that could just as easily be set anywhere. Some of the few exceptions can be found in films like Magnolia and Short Cuts, which explore a web of interconnections between people in ways that seem particularly suited to a sprawling city like Los Angeles. Drawing on these earlier movies, the recently released Crash, which I saw last week at the downtown theater with my sister, concentrates on the specific issue of race. Writer-director Paul Haggis structures the story as a series of racially charged connections between both strangers and acquaintances. Over the course of about 24 hours these characters are all forced towards reckonings with how they deal with race. Haggis has certainly delivered a compelling and well-made movie, with beautifully moody, blue-hued cinematography and editing that is refreshingly controlled for a modern Hollywood film. Other than Don Cheadle, I'm not familiar with most of the ensemble cast, but they turn in excellent performances. Haggis has received some criticism for the coincidences that his screenplay is built on, but I can't say I minded; Crash is infused with enough style as to make it clear that it's not intended as documentary-style realism, and so I was able to accept the coincidences as a Dickensian device for juxtaposing different segments of society. Despite all of these virtues, the screenplay has a number of flaws that ultimately diminish the movie's power. Taking place over about the time of one day, the script has the characters go through dramatic transformations, and while some are justified by the story's dramatic intensity, others, particularly those experienced by a rookie cop and a black TV director, are overly schematic and unconvincing, turning flesh-and-blood characters into pawns in the director's grand scheme. The movie contains several scenes of the characters placed in harm's way that some viewers might find manipulative and overwrought but which I found to be legitimately compelling; there is, however, at least one too many of these moments. One of the difficulties in making an ensemble film has to be keeping the different characters' stories in balance; because many of the characters are set up as protagonists, and not as supporting characters who nudge the story along, there's less leeway in the editing room for removing subplots and tangents that don't turn to work. In Nashville and Magnolia, for instance, there were several characters who had obviously fallen prey to the need to keep the movie to a manageable length, rendering their function in the story more or less incomprehensible. Here, the character of the DA's bitchy, racist wife, played by Sandra Bullock, doesn't prove to be very interesting. Moreover, the crisis that befalls her and prompts self-reflection- she breaks her ankle falling down the stairs and is helped by her Hispanic housekeeper- comes right after several more intense scenes, including a car crash and an armed confrontation. At this point I began to get the feeling that Haggis was just piling on one catastrophe after another. The way in which Haggis keeps the issue of race throughout the film is less than subtle- in every single scene he contrives to have the characters discuss racial issues, so that after a while the movie starts coming off as an after-school special with four-letter words.