Macrocosm Los Angeles
Paul Haggis Takes Cinematic Dramaturgy To The Limit
By Cole Smithey
Screenwriter Paul Haggis (“Million Dollar Baby”) makes an impressive directorial debut with a telescoping deliberation on American race prejudices as viewed through a lens of day-to-day life in the melting pot of Los Angeles.
Haggis rivals Robert Altman’s nimble ability to balance numerous characters across a broad narrative canvas.
Multiple story threads intertwine around a racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his more reasonable partner (Ryan Phillippe), a duo of black car thieves (Larenz Tate and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), a Los Angeles District Attorney (Brendan Fraser), his thin-skinned wife Jean (Sandra Bullock), and a sexist police detective (Don Cheadle). Promising hotshot actor-of-the-moment Terrence Howard is outstanding as Cameron Thayer a successful television director whose dignity is challenged by his high-maintenance wife (Thandie Newton) and the fascist demands of his social milieu. “Crash” is a provocative drama that aligns with the socially conscious American theatrical dramaturgy of the ’30s and ’40s.
One of the most intriguing aspects of “Crash” is how concealed aspects of characters’ personalities are revealed behind their public facades. As with most people you meet in everyday life, the characters in “Crash” are not what they verbally announce themselves to be. Ryan (Matt Dillon) is a hardened veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and wears his offensive bigotry on his sleeve. He’s just one rung below Harvey Keitel’s abysmal character in Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant.” He is prone to
abusing his authority at will.
Ryan and his partner Hanson (Ryan Phillippe) pull over an SUV driven by a black husband (Howard) whose wife (Newton) happens to be giving him a blowjob. Ryan takes advantage of the situation to sexually humiliate Christine (Newton) while her husband is forced to tacitly endorse the atrocity as it’s committed.
The emotionally wrenching scene is characteristic of the high stakes fragments of all-or-nothing drama that play out in unpredictable ways across every subplot of the movie. For all of Ryan’s self-loathing, he nonetheless has an overwhelming involuntary urge to help the very people he consciously categorizes as lesser people. Ryan’s atonement for his heinous behavior is among one of the film’s several climaxes and reveals a hidden layer of humanity that purges the venom we’ve become accustomed to.
The director skillfully puts just enough additional narrative weight on Ryan’s shoulders that the flawed character serves as the legible protagonist in a movie filled with would-be leading characters.
Haggis pays special attention to social context with a realistic ear for dialogue that fluently dips between divergent cultural influences. The Iranian owner of a small retail business possesses such inferior communication skills that his fate seems doomed until his own inferiority serves to redeem him in his assassination attempt against a Latino locksmith that goes awry.
A Chinese smuggler of illegal immigrants is struck by an accident that brings instant karma upon him. In each of these subplots the audience is pulled close inside the mind of the characters and positioned within social parameters that delineate the societal confines each character functions within.
Conclusions that audiences will jump to are repeatedly flipped back upon themselves so that we are given a different set of options that reflect a myriad of choices that go beyond the oversimplified form of thought our American media propagates. Haggis devalues American media spin in favor of our ability to look around ourselves, and into the social ills that relentlessly pound away at our peace of mind as we go through our automobile-obsessed lives.
The extraordinary substance of “Crash” is the way the film eventually confirms a higher nature in humanity. In the end, the labels that reduce instinct to ideology are laid open in the impure air of the Los Angeles night. “Crash” is a movie designed to get people talking, and just perhaps acting outside of the system, in a good way.
