Crash

Paul Haggis wrote Million Dollar Baby (2004) and then, for his first film as director, wrote himself a city. Crash takes a dozen people in Los Angeles over a day and a half and runs them into each other: a detective, a district attorney and his wife, two patrolmen, two carjackers, a locksmith, a television director and his wife, a shopkeeper with a new gun. Everyone is a bigot to somebody and wronged by somebody else. The cast is first-rate, and the script keeps stopping them to explain what they have just shown us.

Matt Dillon plays Officer John Ryan, whose father is ill and whose insurer will not help, and who takes it out on a black couple in an expensive car. The stop is the film’s centre and we watched it in real distress. Dillon does not raise his voice. He searches Christine Thayer (Thandiwe Newton) while her husband Cameron (Terrence Howard) stands a yard away with a torch in his face, and Howard plays the decision to say nothing in the jaw and nowhere else. Newton, humiliated in front of the man she wants to protect her and then furious at him for being protected, is remarkable. Ryan Phillippe’s rookie, Tom Hansen, watches and does nothing, which the film knows is the worst thing in the scene.

The acting stays that good. Michael Peña’s locksmith, Daniel Ruiz, has a scene with his small daughter and a story about an invisible cloak, and plays it plainly. Don Cheadle gives Det. Graham Waters a tiredness that reads as intelligence. Sandra Bullock’s Jean Cabot, rude to everyone after the carjacking, later admits she is angry all the time and cannot say why, the most honest writing Haggis manages. Ludacris, as Anthony, gets the jokes, lecturing Peter (Larenz Tate) on why two black men should be the frightened ones on a white street, and Shaun Toub plays Farhad as a man who has been robbed before and expects it again.

J. Michael Muro shoots the city hand-held and close, mostly at night, street-lamp orange against headlight blue, and when he pulls back Los Angeles looks emptied, as though these dozen people were the only ones in it. Laurence Bennett gives the Cabots a large pale house full of things nobody touches and Daniel a small one where everything has been. Linda Bass puts Cameron in suits that cost more than Ryan’s car. Mark Isham’s score, a low electronic wash with wordless voices, is on nearly all the time, pushing every scene towards sorrow before the actors have got there. Hughes Winborne cuts between the strands so cleanly that we never lost our place.

The trouble is the plot, and the plot is the coincidences. Haggis and Robert Moresco have written a city in which the locksmith who fixes Jean’s locks is accused of cheating by the shopkeeper across town whose door he fixes next, and the same twelve people keep finding each other within thirty-six hours. By the second half we were counting, and once we were counting we had stopped believing. Every character has a prejudice and every prejudice gets a reversal, until the film feels like a diagram of a city rather than a city. And the people talk in paragraphs, telling strangers what they think about race in full sentences and at volume, so the script never has to dramatise its point.

Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) also collided strangers across Los Angeles. Altman let the collisions mean what they meant and Anderson admitted his were absurd. Haggis wants each of his to prove the same thing: that everyone is worse than they look and then better. Most critics liked it more than we do, praising the cast and the nerve and forgiving the contrivance. We agree about the cast.

It is worth an evening for Dillon, Newton and Howard on the roadside and for Peña with his daughter, and there is plenty to argue about afterwards, most of it about whether the film argued fairly. It runs 112 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, which the traffic stop earns on its own.