This suitably simmering study of racial disintegration in L.A. marks Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis’ directorial debut, though his deft, frequently caustic Short Cuts style -chain drama is surprisingly epic for a first timer.
As Haggis’ multi-racial ensemble collides repeatedly across a tense three-day period he picks at ill-healed scabs of cultural friction and builds a grimly compelling compendium of distasteful ethnic jibes. “Yo Osama,” growls an impatient customer at a Persian shopkeeper, “plan the jihad on your own time.” Later, Matt Dillon’s casually racist cop taunts an unfortunate black bureaucrat about “the five or six better qualified white men that didn’t get (her) job” before finger-fucking a mixed-race trophy wife (Newton) during a trumped-up search. Even Miss Congeniality gets stroppy when she happens on a non-waspish locksmith in her regal kitchen; “That gangbanger will sell our keys to his homeys”, she hisses at her shrinking D.A. husband (Fraser).
Crash contrives to subvert such stereotyping with dark Hegelian humour – Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges pontificates about being forced to wait an hour and thirty-two minutes for a plate of spaghetti because the over-caffeinated white neighbourhood assumes you’re a shifty sort before whipping out a pistol to car-jack some well-to-do white folks. Similarly, a Persian immigrant (Toub) is appalled that someone could mistake him for an Iraqi.
Amidst an impeccable cast, Mr. Cheadle emerges as the deal-breaker. In a role that sees him torn between his junkie mom and a compromised career as a police detective, he’s given further space to demonstrate his aptitude for affecting melancholia, and even when the last act gets a little overcooked (too many people staring out too many windows), he never sweats it.
As tensions mount and various flash-points build toward thrillingly awful conclusions, the soapy marriage of keen social awareness and melodrama starts to resemble a glossier rendition of a Loachian verse. But if Lord Ken’s output points toward a utopian socialist alternative, -Crash’s outlook is rather bleaker (amazing, but true). Haggis’ disharmonious portrait of a viper-pit is far too tangled to suggest any happy conclusions; its resolutions seem temporary and play more like a desperate time-out call before everyone gets back in the ring than a rainbow-tinted call for tolerance.
Modestly dazzling, all the same.