Crash

What’s the Story?

Sprawling and ambitious, episodic and contrived, CRASH weaves together a series of stories about post-9/11 fearfulness. The characters range and include L.A. detectives Graham (Don Cheadle) and his partner and lover, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), uniformed officers Ryan (Matt Dillon) and Thomas (Ryan Phillippe), 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. After a violent carjacking, well-to-do Jean (Sandra Bullock) turns on her D.A. husband (Brendan Fraser), then accuses their young locksmith of looking like an untrustworthy gangbanger. Later, locksmith Daniel (Michael Peña) comforts his terrified little girl, who can't forget the gunshots she remembers from their old neighborhood. Iranian shopkeeper Farhad (Shaun Toub) is also afraid, due to a robbery. His daughter Dorri (Bahar Soomekh) tries to calm him by purchasing a gun he can keep in a drawer. In each case, security is a fantasy -- in the face of random violence (or maybe karmic-payback), one can only hope to survive.

Is It Any Good?

Opening with the aftermath of a car wreck under investigation, this Best Picture Oscar-winner is plainly about loss. But the loss of what isn't immediately obvious. 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 having sex in their car. He's cruel, but they can't 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.