Film review - Crash (15) (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Film review - Crash (15)

IT'S great when a film comes along that is difficult to categorise. Or indeed, you struggle to find an answer when someone asks the question: "What's it about?"

If you need to pigeonhole Crash, then it's a drama. But that is really oversimplifying matters. It's much more than just a drama. It's also one of the best films released this year so far.

Set in Los Angeles, Crash introduces us to a disparate group of characters whose lives become entwined over the course of a couple of days by a series of events that range from the unpleasant to the tragic.

A pair of disaffected black youths car-jack a well-to-do couple on a night out. A Persian shop owner seeks vengeance on the Mexican locksmith he holds responsible for the night-time raid on his store. A traffic cop pulls over a well-to-do black couple and turns a body search on the wife into a degrading violation. And there is the black detective trying to hold it together while his younger brother gets caught up in drugs and crime.

As these stories unfold, they overlap and interconnect, like pieces in a jigsaw. And once all those pieces have slotted together, the resulting picture isn't a pretty one.

This is Hollywood holding a mirror up to itself, and probably not liking what it sees as it plays out a saga of suspicion, distrust, prejudice and plain hate.

As a Hollywood outsider, Canadian director Paul Haggis he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby can afford to do this, and indeed for some of the incidents he has drawn on personal experience (he was a car-jacking victim himself, which proved to be the trigger for the film).

It's why the people do what they do in the film that Haggis focuses on, and it makes fascinating viewing. He doesn't judge the people involved Matt Dillon's racist cop is the least sympathetic character in the ensemble (although you probably wouldn't want to put any of them on your Christmas card list), but there is some understanding for his actions as he struggles to care for his dying father. And he can be a hero when the occasion demands.

In her mind, Thandie Newton (black) believes she has been "raped" by Dillon (white) and is angry that her husband (Terrence Howard, black) could only stand and watch helplessly, under the eye of Dillon's partner (Ryan Phillippe, white), knowing that it would make matters worse if he intervened.

So, Crash is about racism then. Well yes, it is, but again that's just too simple a label and doesn't do Haggis's complex but compelling script the justice it deserves.

The director is served well by an outstanding cast. All are good Cheadle and Dillon stand out, but even Bullock, in the brief scenes she is in, gives her best performance yet and proves she is effective at straight acting.

It is also quite remarkable that Haggis has tied his film up in a tidy 112 minutes, a testament to economic storytelling and expert editing.

Crash is not laugh-a-minute stuff, but don't be put off by what sounds like a pretty depressing night out. It's a worthy film and definitely not a dull one. And while it doesn't exactly have a happy ending in the traditional Hollywood sense Haggis pulls out one final surprise which suggests that, despite all that has gone before, there is always hope.

Rating 8/10

Stephen Webb