The question that inevitably comes to mind with director Paul Haggis' Crash is a basic one: What's up with the name? After all, Haggis, who also wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, seems like a pretty tuned-in guy. Surely he must have heard of that other, rather notorious Crash written by J.G. Ballard in 1973 or of its equally notorious big screen adaptation by David Cronenberg.
Still, lack of originality aside, Crash isn't an entirely inappropriate title for a movie that takes place in what is arguably the car capital of the free world, L.A. – a place populated, according to one of Haggis' characters, by steel-and-glass-encased inhabitants so craving of a human touch that they literally crash into one another just for a little personal contact. Come to think of it, even the whole desensitization angle sounds pretty close to what Ballard and Cronenberg had going on in their respective Crash's.
That's where the similarities end, though, as this new Crash is not remotely about those fiery automobile smash-ups that so consumed Cronenberg and Ballard (although Haggis does manage to give us one or two at key points). Haggis' Crash does contain plenty of explosions, for what it's worth, but they're mostly of the human sort – awful, uncontrollable outpourings of very personal, pent-up rage and despair. And the cause of all that rage and despair takes a far more specific shape than Cronenberg's vaguely insinuating, all-purpose angst.
What consumes the characters in Crash is as mundane as it is terrible: differences in skin color, accents, ethnicity and any other cultural trait that might make it possible for one person to hate another. In a nutshell, Crash is a sort of A-Z guide to racial tensions in modern America, and about how even the best of us sometimes use those tensions to drive ourselves and each other crazy.
Haggis opens his film with an actual car crash, followed by the first of many human collisions. Two dazed accident victims, one Latino and one Asian, emerge from their smoking vehicles and immediately begin hurling racial slurs at one another. From there, we cut to a middle-aged Arab man being insulted and refused while trying to buy a weapon at a gun shop.
Next up is a well-heeled African-American couple returning home from a pleasant evening on the town only to find themselves harassed, humiliated and physically abused by a white cop with an agenda. Then there are the two young black men who, after ranting about the indignities of racial profiling, proceed to point guns at the head of a strolling white woman and abscond with her SUV.
It eventually becomes apparent that we're watching the individual components of a self-perpetuating hate machine at work, a vicious cycle feeding on its own ugly, angry emotions. The abusing cop perceives himself as a victim of racial abuse. The carjacked woman becomes paralyzed by paranoia and takes her frustration out on the ominously tattooed but innocent Mexican guy fixing her lock. Meanwhile, her big-shot DA husband hushes up the carjacking incident, fearful it might cost him the black vote. Gradually, all of the characters' lives begin criss-crossing, over and over again, and never the same way twice.
Crash takes the form of an Altman-esque ensemble piece a la Short Cuts, with Haggis introducing some dozen characters of various ethnic backgrounds, and then elaborately interweaving their lives over a brief period of time. We follow these stories as they dovetail and collide, with minor characters coming to the fore and then receding, only to reappear later in an altogether different light.
Victims become victimizers, heroes become villains, and unexpected acts of heroism emerge from the movie's worst offenders. Haggis constantly complicates the playing field, exposing ethical dilemmas, supplying extenuating circumstances that effectively alter what just a scene or two ago appeared to be the rules of the game. The movie is all about tensions between black and white, certainly, but the shifting context in Crash leaves no doubt that what we're really dealing with is mostly shades of gray.
In Crash, people are constantly doing the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons, with each miscommunication accentuating the movie's overarching ironies. The film's Arab character turns out to be Persian, a Chinese woman is really Korean, a Mexican is actually Salvadorian, and so on. The message is clear – all of this hate thrives on incorrect assumptions – but Haggis' delivery is so cleverly choreographed it sometimes seems at odds with the demands of his material. Even when the movie's emotions and ideas are rough and messy, as they frequently are, the way the film fits them together is anything but.
Ultimately, Crash lays everything out in a manner that's just a bit too contrived, too symmetrical and perfectly calibrated, with all of the stories neatly counter-balanced and too few of the loose ends we see in real life. Everything is in its place, every point eloquently made in a way that verges on being a tad too pleased with its own cunning.
By the movie's mid-point, all of the story threads are well on their way to some sort of grand harmonic convergence, with the coincidences piling up so thick and fast, it's hard not to feel overwhelmed. Haggis no doubt means for these coincidences to feel spectacularly contrived – the film makes no bones, after all, about being an intricately conceived allegory-as-social-commentary – but that doesn't keep us from straining to suspend disbelief.
Still, it's hard to complain too loudly about a filmmaker trying to do too much for once as opposed to too little. On the strength of Million Dollar Baby alone, Haggis could have done pretty much anything he wanted here, and he chose the high road. His Crash is such a surprisingly smart package, in fact, that it's a shame he felt the need to tie it all up for us with that big, fancy bow.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in May 4-10, 2005.