message in the movies By Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

           
Crash  Rated R
Directed by Paul Haggis. Starring Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon

 Photo © Copyright Lions Gates Film
This film begins and ends with car crashes.  An automobile accident is probably a good metaphor for a sudden event that forces you to stop and think about everything that has led you to a regrettable turn of events.  Crash tells about a half-dozen interlocking stories about how people react to each other based on race and class and past histories.  The film takes place in Los Angeles, California, and includes politicians, police officers, immigrants, television producers, wannabe street thugs and drug addicts.  Nothing is quite as it seems, and the clever screenplay suggests that even a person who is a blatant racist might have some good in them and admirable people may carry with them deeply hidden faults.  The large cast is uniformly excellent, including the rapper Ludacris in his first major film role.  First-time Director-writer Haggis is also the author of the Oscar-winning screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, and he does a nice job juggling the plot points and making the film consistently interesting.  I left the theater feeling guilty about racism, but realized that I hadn’t really learned very much.  The longer I thought about the film (which works so very hard to drive its anti-racism message home), the less I admired it.  There are so many big speeches and dramatically significant events in the film, the viewer isn’t given much room to arrive at any other conclusion than what the filmmakers intend.  Spike Lee’s 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing and last year’s House of Sand and Fog were full of much more passion, tragedy and pain.  Nevertheless, this is a controversial film in the best sense of the word – it will force you to think about the things that bring people together and the things that keep us apart.  It may even get you to think about sin, grace, and forgiveness, if you choose to bring your faith into the theater

Pitchfork Rating: Three halos.(A consistently clever if somewhat heavy-handed meditation on race and class in America.)  Three pitchforks. (A consistently clever if somewhat heavy-handed meditation on race and class in America.) 

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