'Crash' examines racialdivides in urban society

Paul Haggis’ feature debut “Crash” opens with a conversation between two cops (Don Cheadle and Jennifer Esposito) who have just been rear-ended by an Asian woman who won’t stop screaming at the top of her lungs that they “Blaked too fast.” (read: Breaked too fast.)

Featuring an ensemble of actors — you name them, they’re in this movie — interpreting a series of characters intended to represent a cross section of Los Angeles ethnic, racial and socio-economic groups, Haggis’s film offers a hypnotic, poetic study of race in America.

“We’re always behind this metal and glass,” says Cheadle. “It’s the sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

(More on this line later.)

In an early scene, Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton are a “black, Hollywood power couple,” pulled over after a late night of partying by Matt Dillon — “corrupt, white-supremacist cop” ­— who’s partner is Ryan Phillippe, playing “naive newbie on the police force.” (With so many characters involved, trying to remember their actual names seems futile.)

Dillon, with no legitimate reason for pulling the couple over, forces the husband out of his car as the drunk wife cries racial bias. Dillon begins fondling the wife, taunting the husband to prove his manhood as Phillippe looks on in silent disapproval.

The husband is faced with a decision to passively accept the abuse or to defend the honor of his wife, necessarily jeopardizing his life and career in a town run by white people.

Writer/director Haggis has thus, through a set of interlocking vignettes, postured his characters in a series of dramatic conundrums to examine the sociology and psychology of race from as many perspectives — perhaps too many — as possible.

He takes a no-holds-barred approach to the subject. Watching the film, you kind of get the impression that offending the audience was a top priority.

Personally, as the whitest of Americans, I was scared to laugh when Don Cheadle’s “black altruist cop,” speaking to his Puerto Rican girlfriend (Esposito) about Hispanic Americans, delivered the line, “I guess the mystery is, who gathered all these remarkably different cultures together and taught them all how to park their cars on their lawns?”

But then, the “cracker” jokes are just as rich and hilarious.

The film nails the issue of race and effectively invalidates all previous attempts to do as much.

But you won’t come away from the theater with any answers. Haggis eventually turns the stereotypes on their heads and proves that no one is above racism and everyone is touched by it. (We’re all racists, but racists are human too!)

The film’s brilliance is that it does not try to identify the source of the problem but instead depicts racism as an infinite cycle of hatred that’s not likely to be broken anytime soon. (This may sound bleak, but — worry not — Ludacris provides us a little hope by the end.)

Now, back to that Cheadle line from the beginning: Normally, I’d find such quotable, unsubtle summing-up of the film’s themes pretty annoying. But in comes Sandra Bullock at the end of the movie to redeem the writer/director.

Bullock’s character, “rich, lonely, racist housewife,” is the most underdeveloped and seemingly (at first) out of place. But, then, in one of the closing scenes, the writer gives her a monologue that provides the bookend to Cheadle’s opening observation.

Speaking on the phone to her best friend, who’s barely listening, she admits to being angry — a lot, and at nothing.

And, suddenly, and that simply, Haggis has successfully pasted on a new layer to the film’s complex thematic schema by making the film about American isolationism and the anger and fear—and racism — that it spawns.

“Crash” is a tiny film full of gigantic ideas.

With the juggernaut that is “Star Wars: Episode III” being released today, I don’t think even Yoda could have summed up such a complex issue any better.

Contact the A&E Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.