Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that, as the film interrogates urban fears, violence, and racism, the language, particularly the use of racial epithets, is rough. The film also features several violent scenes, including a carjacking, a pedestrian hit by a car, a five-year-old child shot by a handgun (with her parents watching), and several car crashes. Policemen, detectives, district attorneys, and an insurance adjuster prove untrustworthy; characters steal cars, do drugs, drink, smoke cigarettes, and have sex (including implied oral sex in a car and a cop putting his hands on a woman's private parts, in front of her upset husband, under the guise of "patting her down."
Families might discuss the film's representations of racism, anger, and fearfulness, embodied and acted on by nearly every character. Families might also think about the ways that current urban and mass-mediated experiences lead to alienation and cultural divisions. Families might also discuss the several family situations, in particular, the five-year-old girl's trust in her caring father, and adult children trying to look after aging parents. How do family relationships affect your trust of others? How do some characters use aggression (verbal and physical) to establish their sense of identity?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Opening with a car wreck, not the event but the aftermath, a scene under investigation by weary L.A. detective Graham (Don Cheadle), CRASH is plainly about loss. But the loss of what is less immediately obvious. Sprawling and ambitious, episodic and contrived, the movie pulls together a series of stories, all concerning post-9/11 fearfulness.
The characters range from detectives (also including Graham's partner and lover, Ria [Jennifer Esposito]) and uniformed officers Ryan (Matt Dillon) and Thomas (Ryan Phillippe), to petty thieves Anthony (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate), and tv director Cameron (Terrence Howard) and his wife Christine (Thandie Newton). All of them make assumptions about others, based on appearance and the distress they've suffered in their own lives. When Jean (Sandra Bullock), for instance, is scared following the violent carjacking of her SUV, she turns on her husband, D.A. Rick (Brendan Fraser), then accuses the young locksmith who's come to change all the locks in their large home of looking like an untrustworthy gangbanger.
That night, the locksmith, Daniel (Michael Peña), returns to his own home to find his five-year-old daughter hiding under her bed. She's remembering the gunshots that rang through the night in their old neighborhood, and so he bestows on her his "invisible cape," promising it will protect her from harm. At the same time, the Iranian shopkeeper Farhad (Shaun Toub) is afraid, following a robbery. His daughter Dorri (Bahar Soomekh) tries to calm him by purchasing a gun he can keep in a drawer, pretending for the dealer that she knows the difference between one box of ammunition and another. In both cases, security is a fantasy -- in the face of random (or maybe karmic-payback) violence, you can only hope to survive.
Each interaction seems a kind of collision. For example, Ryan's ailing father makes him anxious, and so he takes it out on Cameron and Christine, whom he finds one night, post-party, having sex in their Mercedes. His harassment is cruel, but they can not fight back: he's a cop. When Thomas suggests Ryan has crossed a line, the older cop defends himself by blaming the work: "Wait till you've been on the job a few more years. You think you know who you are; you have no idea."
Some violent encounters are actual crashes, minor and major, lending the movie a sort of stop-and-start rhythm. This structure is exacerbated by the awkward multi-culti casting. CRASH takes a "one-from-every-food-group" approach to race representation (including a mostly unseen Asian pedestrian hit by a car and dragged beneath). The movie seems geared toward those viewers who were surprised by the Rodney King video, that is, people who don't regularly deal with cultural collisions. For others, its machinations will grind.
Families who enjoy this movie might also want to see Magnolia (another sprawling Los Angeles Epic), Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (about racism in NYC), or Don Cheadle's other "social problem" films, including Rosewood, A Lesson Before Dying, and Traffic.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentCharacters have sex, and oral sex is insinuated. |
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ViolenceCar crashes, some fighting. |
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LanguageVery strong language. |
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Social BehaviorWhile characters steal and commit acts of violence, the film looks at reasons and contexts. |
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CommercialismExpensive cars. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking, smoking. |
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