Crash [2004]

After writing the excellent Million Dollar Baby (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), Paul Haggis decided to go behind the camera for his next project, gathering together a large cast of familiar faces for a drama that jumps between various people who live in Los Angeles and their lives eventually tying them together to tell a story of racism and gun control.

Managing to win the Oscar for best picture, Crash honestly didn’t deserve that honour (I thought that belonged to Steven Spielberg’s Munich), but it’s still an interesting movie that offers enough strong performances and well written dialogue to overcome the few minor complaints I have with it.

Starting with a car crash that detective Don Cheadle is attending and flashing back to the events leading up to that point, Haggis and his co-writer Bobby Moresco wind their story in-and-out of the lives of their characters over a period of two days focusing on a mildly corrupt cop with a sick father (Matt Dillon) and his new partner (Ryan Phillippe), a young Mexican locksmith trying to go clean (Michael Pena), two cocky car thieves (Larenz Tate, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), a successful African-American businessman and his wife (Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton), and the district attorney and his bitchy wife (Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock).

We get little glimpses of these people as they make their way through what they consider to be their normal day as things begin to go wrong around them. Some of them deserve it, others don’t, but at times it’s hard to really care for the characters because as a viewer there’s a feeling of being “disconnected” from the action that seeps in from time to time.

That’s one of my issues with Crash. Another is that there’s just too many damn characters in the movie – a fact that rears its ugly little head when a few of them aren’t nearly as fleshed-out as we would’ve liked (this is especially true for Fraser’s character, who’s merely “there” for the most part). Haggis also doesn’t manage to bring enough emotion to certain scenes that are intended to hit a nerve with his audience with only a moment involving Pena‘s little girl and a crazed (and armed) gun owner really having any lasting impact. But this is a movie about moments, and in this respect Haggis does well staging them - Dillon’s harassment of Newton and its subsequent second meeting, Bullock thinking Pena is a gang member, and Bridge’s failed carjack of Howard – giving us enough going on at any time to keep us watching.

Dillon and Howard make the best of their screen time giving their roles just enough aplomb and believability, while rapper and part-time actor Brown also makes a good impression as the young, outspoken hoodlum. Bullock fares well in her limited role, and Phillippe proves he’s a well rounded actor despite not really being in a ton of movies lately. It’s just too bad character actor William Fichtner wasn’t given a larger role.

It may sound like, with all my nitpicking, that I think Crash isn’t a good film – it is. It pulls strong performances out of its cast, things are tied together quite neatly when all is said and done, and it’s a solid drama overall – it’s a sure sign that Haggis knows what he’s doing, which gives us hope he’ll resurrect the sagging James Bond franchise with the next movie (which is currently filming).

2.5 out of 4

Directed by Paul Haggis. Written by Haggis, Bobby Moresco. 112 minutes. R