Fasten your seat belts

“Any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people. People bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.” Don Cheadle’s musings on urban alienation give a false sense of security to the beginning of the film: quiet, distant, contemplative. In the same way a car will blindside you while you’re day-dreaming off in the opposite direction, the drama immediately kicks into gear, careering out of control, in a barrage of racial abuse that takes down any idea in its path that this is a city of angels.

“I’m angry all the time. And I don’t know why.”

Crash runs as a series of tightly knitted vignettes, violent pas-de-deuxs where the partners are racially diverse colours, worn in much the same ways as the Crips and the Bloods, drawing up battle-lines, shooting off warnings, and highlighting targets. Judging books by their covers is the only way to find your footing in the labyrinth of pitfalls that is multi-culturalism, when all your energies are taken up with the less than simple demands of living. Life ain’t easy, and the availability of someone else to blame is always tempting.

“They think we’re Arabs. When did Persians become Arab?”

Governor Schwarzenegger, smiling down from his framed photo in the police chief’s office, used to have it easy. He knew who the good guys were, who the baddies. Here, life is more complicated. People are some shade of grey, and anyone can be temporarily redeemed, or can slip up and condemn themselves in the most irreversible ways. Were Arnie the policeman rescuing a woman from a burning car, he’d be a straightcut hero. Matt Dillon’s character, however, is also one of the nastiest pieces of work the LAPD has to offer. “You think you know who you are? You have no idea,” he tells a rookie colleague trying to do the right thing.

Though the scenes play out like heavy bouts of WWF, pantomime has little or no place. Theatricality, however, is allowed, indulged even. People deliver speeches that sometimes border on the verbose. The carefully crafted proximity and interconnectedness of the cast of characters would be more at home in a stage-play. One or two of the climactic scenes wouldn’t be at all out of place in a opera. The format is most definitely not that of cinematic realism. But this shouldn’t be used as a criticism of the piece. By freeing the viewer from those conventions, and challenging us to watch the film as a choreographed rondo, we are given scope to look at the larger, multi-layered picture. One where the characters represent not just themselves, but a set of beliefs and prejudices. Groupings of people.

The heavy use of coincidence fires like synapse activity between these people from such different areas of the organism. It’s an ensemble dance where 6 degrees of separation is reduced a few notches. No man is an island here. Everyone is part of the larger structure. And whether the convention is taken too far to support credibility is not an issue. It drives home a point of the interconnectiveness of communal existence.

Million Dollar Baby writer Paul Haggis is Canadian, and as such he writes and directs with an outsider’s eye, a perspective that allows him to highlight both the harsh realities as well as the muddled confusions a city like LA struggles with. Less room is given, however, to the characters’ individualities. This can lead to their prejudices being little more than broad-brush stereotypes themselves. It’s a minor quip in an otherwise strongly politically committed piece.

There is no room for subtleties in the language. People from such varied backgrounds trying to make themselves understood allows little room to be anything other than painfully direct. This is street-fighting as dialogue, fists and fingers and nails.

“Yo, Osama, plan the Jihad on your own time.”

It’s also a microcosm of the world at large. Fortress America at the beginning of this new century has generated a wealth of new enemies abroad. Inside the fortress, Americans have been bombarded with the ideologies of siege, defending your own, and fearing the outsider. The parallels between the external and the internal are here thrown into a stark light.

“Yeah, you’re liberating my country while I’m flying 747s into your mud-huts and incinerating your friends. Now get the fuck outta my store!”

The body can buckle up in its Humvee and protect itself from incoming dangers. But when the insides turn malignant, there’s a much bigger problem to be faced.

Crash features an ensemble cast including Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, Don Cheadle, Jennifer Esposito, Sandra Bullock, Ludacris, Brendan Fraser et al.

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