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‘Crash’ is a searing
look at urban life
By Joanne Hilty
Special to the Rappahannock News
“Crash” is a must-see stunning drama about racial and ethnic relations in urban America today during one 36-hour period in Los Angeles. Starring Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard and Brendan Fraser, “Crash” is not only about the collision of cars on which L.A. is built, but also about the collision of races, cultures and classes. Screenwriter Paul Haggis (directed “Million Dollar Baby”) suggests that violent contact in word or on wheels is the only way to reach out and touch somebody. RAAC is sponsoring the showing of “Crash” at The .Theatre on Gay Street, Washington, VA, Friday, September 2, 8:00 p.m.
In this film, a dozen diverse Los Angeles residents come into conflict over a carjacking, a traffic arrest, a break-in and various other incidents. The district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and feig wife (Sandra Bullock) are carjacked at gunpoint by two black men (Ludacris and Larenz Tate). At home, the wife orders the locks changed and then changed again because a Mexican (Michael Pena) did the first job. A black TV director (Terrence Howard) is stopped by two white cops, one a racist (Matt Dillon) and his partner (Ryan Phillippe). A Persian store owner (Shaun Toub), taken for an Arab, buys a gun for protection. Don Cheadle plays a detective who ties these stories together when he finds a dead body in the road.
It is an intriguingly mixed and superb cast with Dillon as the standout Officer Ryan. His is the character with the most extreme variance of evil and good, brutality and generosity. A cynic who bullies people of color, he’s also a dutiful son caring for a dying father. Cheadle, as one of the film’s producers, creates a more sensitive and ambivalent cop.
Haggis, who conceived the idea for “Crash” after he was carjacked, is the TV producer-writer (“EZ Street”) who found F.X. Toole’s boxing stories and adapted them into “Million Dollar Baby” for Clint Eastwood (who has since tapped him for two other scripts, including his upcoming Iwo Jima bio-drama “Faith of Our Fathers.”)
“Crash” is cleverly plotted and^designed and suggests that acts of goodness, mercy and compassion matter, that anyone, at any moment, can make a crucial difference. It very convincingly argues that in a world where everything cam seem to be black amd white, nothing really is.
Rated R for sexual scenes, obscenity and violence; run time is 107 minutes.
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