CS Daily Archive > Weekend Read > 05/06/05

Cars, Cops, and a Bubbling

Cauldron of L.A. Ill Will

By yon motskin

After landing a knockout with his first script for Oscar-nominated Million Dollar Baby, Paul Haggis strains too much in this ambitious but overheated and overworked story about Los Angeles race relations as seen through a web of intersecting lives.

Crash

Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco

Set in contemporary Los Angeles amidst cars, contradictions, and racial conflict, Crash is an ensemble narrative that slowly peels out the fates of more than ten protagonists like a revved-up Thunderbird on asphalt. A white district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his wife (Sandra Bullock) are carjacked by two black men (Ludacris and Larenz Tate). A Persian storeowner seeks revenge on a Mexican locksmith after being vandalized. A black detective (Don Cheadle) compromises his ethics to save his criminal brother. A racist white cop (Matt Dillon), frustrated at an HMO's indifference to his sick father (Bruce Kirby), sexually abuses a black couple (Terence Howard and Thandie Newton) on a routine stop (to the disgust of his white rookie partner [Ryan Phillipe]). These are some of the stories, but there are more.

Whatever was left of my waning admiration for David Denby, film critic for The New Yorker, is now gone. He called Crash the best American movie since Mystic River, and with all due respect for him and Mr. Haggis, it is not. Crash, a great idea on paper, is the perfect example of how a good script does not translate into a good movie. A film, as viewed by an audience, has an unliteral, intangible, gut-emotional quality of sight and sound entirely separate from a script. Whereas the script for Crash brims with interesting intersections of characters and coincidences, onscreen these same intersections come off as overly clever, overwrought, and unbelievable.

Haggis, a fiftysomething Canadian-born TV writer/producer, came up with Crash years ago after being carjacked himself at gunpoint. Along with Million Dollar Baby, he wrote this on spec (a rare risk among successful writers) with Bobby Moresco, workshopped it at Moresco's theater group, attracted A-list cast, and premiered it at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival.

Nobody can accuse Crash of not being ambitious -- in scope, subject matter, and theme. The acting is underwhelming (except Don Cheadle, who is excellent), and I mention it here because good acting could have enhanced the sharp and non-politically correct dialogue. The structure and many motifs are ripped off from Magnolia, which itself is ripped off from Short Cuts. But whereas Magnolia put a fresh spin on old narrative ideas, Crash adds nothing new to interweaving multi-story lines in a 24-hour period in Los Angeles. Even a late epiphany of weird weather (snow in Crash, frogs in Magnolia) smells stale. And a payoff sequence involving the racist cop and a damsel in distress is so concocted that it simply cannot be taken seriously.

This is all to say that despite its shortcomings, Haggis is obviously an extremely gifted writer. Two sequences are particularly emotional and unexpected. Without spoiling either, one scene focuses on Matt Dillon's racist cop pleading with a black healthcare worker to help his ailing father. The idea, Haggis says, came from a piece of disturbing hate mail that he received years ago while working on his TV show Family Law. The letter berated Haggis for "always making white people the villains and black people the heroes." This was not true, but Haggis held onto the letter and, years later, used the idea for Dillon's character. A second sequence involves a tense twist when the Persian's store is vandalized; he arms himself and hunts down the locksmith whom he believes installed a faulty lock. The twist, a beautiful blend of magical realism and good writing, is as unexpected to the audience as it is to the characters themselves.

Crash, a good idea but flat film, suffers from having too many story strands to tie up. Some threads are better left open-ended or dangling. Perhaps the very talented Haggis should have simplified and written less -- as he did with Million Dollar Baby, of which he wrote only one draft.

Crash
Lions Gate Films
Rated R; 100 min.

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Writer-director Yon Motskin is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Film Program. He is currently preparing to shoot his first feature film, Cutman, based on his award-winning short that premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and screened worldwide.
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