Crash: B+
by Patricia Draznin
When two cars crash, the drivers collide in a verbal joust of racial
slurs. One of the passengers (Don Cheadle), an investigator for LAPD,
muses that crashing appeases the lost sense of touch. “In other
cities you walk, you brush past people, people bump into you; in
L.A., nobody touches you, we’re always behind this metal and glass.”
In the spirit of Magnolia and Grand Canyon,
Crash stages a montage
of seemingly independent scenarios where the lives of several characters
of different races, classes, and attitudes intersect and collide, giving
us a wide-angle lens on bias, perception, and human behavior—including
our own. We see a District Attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his wife (Sandra
Bullock) getting carjacked at gunpoint. We see a black producer (Terrence
Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton) getting humiliated by a white
policeman (Matt Dillon), while his rookie partner (Ryan Phillippe) watches
in disgust. We see a Persian shop owner get vandalized because of a
broken door, which prevents him from collecting insurance.
Observing characters at their best or worst, we peg the good guys and
the bad guys. Or do we? Filmmaker Paul Haggis isn’t letting us
off that easy. His script plays out like that eye-teaser image that
sometimes appears as two silhouettes and sometimes as a vase. Crash is that same lesson in perception, that people are not simply this way
or that. People are multifaceted beings, propelled by circumstances
and beliefs, whose attitudes are subject to change. And if we as viewers
hold too tightly to our beliefs, we are as guilty of prejudice as the
people we are judging.
Crash offers the experience of unrelated lives colliding, from
which we can draw our own conclusions. But don’t conclude
too fast. In this film, and maybe in life, Haggis suggests waiting
until we’ve observed someone in enough situations. And walked
a mile in their shoes. And crashed into someone else’s life.
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