Warning:
The following essay contains many spoilers; it is greatly recommended you see the film CRASH first before reading it (and to also form your own opinion).
What has lead to this great divide? As a screenwriter myself, my focus when watching films often goes first to the script, but this was especially true for CRASH. Unusual for a modern day film (although there were others this past year, the marvelous SQUID AND THE WHALE for one, that were almost as word-centric). CRASH's screenplay, which director Paul Haggis co-wrote with Bobby Moresco, is what people talk about - even if they don't realize it: the words, the ideas, the dramatic things that occur. And it is for this reason that I wanted to take a closer look at what I considered to be an interesting, and also often overreaching, screenplay.
Screenwriter Paul Haggis has said that the inspiration for the first dialogue in CRASH, given to the policeman Graham (played in the film by the always superb Don Cheadle), came from his own philosophical wanderings after a scary experience in Los Angeles.
GRAHAM (V.O.)
It's the sense of touch...
Any real city, you walk, you're
bumped, brush past people. In LA,
no one touches you....
We're always behind metal and glass.
Think we miss that touch so much,
we crash into each other just to
feel something.
The problem with this particular speech is that, although it's undeniably provocative - and a true observation about Los Angeles - it doesn't really sound like anything a policeman would say, or, for that matter, that just about anyone would say. It sounds like something Paul Haggis said, or thought, and wanted to put into a screenplay. To his credit, he does something clever to nudge it in a little more believably - he has Graham say this to his partner Ria in a car after the two of them have been rear-ended. He's "either dazed or grappling with a very deep thought" Haggis writes in the description." Ria then comments on how "Somewhere in there one of us lost our frame of reference" so there's an acknowledgment that he's being unusually philosophical after bonking his head. Somehow it works, and sets up - for better and for worse - the modus operandi of the script (and subsequent film) to follow.
Whatever I perceive as the film's flaws I do give Haggis props for trying to probe at our currently broken zeitgeist, and in particular for capturing the tempest that is LA. Warts and all, the script is a brave piece of work, with ample opportunities for the actors - a gifted cast graced the finished film - to show their mettle.
But the "look at me!" screenplay is the thing here and I think it's worthy of study. Haggis won an Oscar the year before for his script for MILLION DOLLAR BABY - another often superb screenplay occasionally marred by moments where characters dip maddeningly into one-dimensional archetype. In that film, and in CRASH, it's that very rare moment where you forget you're watching something that's being written. Some of the reaction against the film may be because of this, because the characterizations come from a thesis, and because the script (and the finished film) doesn't hide its contrivances.
It's designed symmetrically, too, with characters overlapping, "crashing" into each other, to unrealistic proportions. The story is structured as a series of vignettes; each scene never leaves the subject of racism. When one of the characters isn't actually saying something racist, they talk to each other about racism and race.
CRASH feels like an extended version of the unforgettable racial epithet sequence in Spike Lee's superior DO THE RIGHT THING. Here as with that film, the central thesis is that everyone is a racist; it just boils over or bubbles under depending on the person. Again, the people in this film often react and speak in a more exaggerated version of how their types would in reality. How the script and the film works for people may depend on whether they can let go of our need for "real". Instead, CRASH is hyper-real, as if the real world were processed, then sent back out for dry cleaning and returned before being put back up on the screen.
Haggis has said publicly that the impetus for this film came from a real life experience in Los Angeles (and, yes, people do have real life experiences in LA) when Haggis and his wife had a frightening, if also darkly funny, experience being carjacked. This in particular inspired one of the script's more memorable early moments, in which the two young African Americans, Anthony (played in the film by rapper Ludacris, who was excellent) and Peter (Larenz Tate) - they're named after saints, get it? - walk down the street in Santa Monica after leaving an Italian restaurant complaining about the racist service, commenting on how all the white folks around them - specifically Rick and Jean (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock) - are scared of them. The script expertly shows both side of this story - how paranoia builds based on misperceptions - and then twists things a little in the end. The scene ends famously, after Anthony rails about the white woman who fears them - "if anybody should be scared, it's us, the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people" - only to reveal that he and Peter have guns and they really are carjackers, taking Rick and Jean's SUV. (I find it hard to have sympathy for anyone driving a Lincoln Navigator who doesn't have 7 kids and/or own a construction business, but never mind.) The moment comes as a surprise, and the dialogue between Anthony and Peter here and throughout the film is razor-sharp, funny, and engaging. But the twist feels contrived; if the two intelligent black kids hadn't been revealed to be thieves, it would have been satisfying and less surprising.
Without revealing the entire incident, what happens to Peter later is a tragedy that could have been averted. By the screenwriters. If there was one scene that made me actually say "argh" out loud in the movie theater, and then again when reading the screenplay, it was this one.
The film also doesn't dig to the very bottom - What really makes people racist? Why is everyone so afraid of everyone else? - but it does well in building compelling characters (with the exception, I think, of Ryan Philippe's cop, with the aforementioned "argh" scene the ), and if nothing else the writing here is a great lesson in creating space for actors to act. The performances in the finished film vindicate this to a certain extent; they're all first-rate.
Irritations abound, however. I recall grinding my teeth during the the early scene when the Iranian character Farhad goes with his daughter Dorri to purchase a gun, and has to deal with the racist gun shop owner. While the latter is certainly not a stretch of the imagination, the interplay felt a little obvious -
FARHAD
Are you making insults at me?
DIRK (the salesman)
Am I making insults at you?? That's the closest you get to English?
FARHAD
I am American citizen -
DIRK
(here it comes)
--Oh, God.
(calling off)
Steve, did you sell this gun to these camel-jockies?
Dirk in this scene is meant to represent the ugly American whose racism bubbles right up on the surface. In this post-9/11 time especially (which is referenced here too when Dirk says, "Yeah, I'm an ignorant man, I fly 747s into your fucking mud huts and burn all your friends"), he is entirely possible, and yet the notes the dialogue strikes here seems to cry "Racist" with a capital R, as if they'd consulted an anti-Arab checklist (Dirk also calls him "sand nigger," "camel jockey" and "Ahab"). The scene does switch the tables, just as do many moments and scenes in the film, when the salesman ends up helping Dorri after Farhad leaves, patronizing, but more accommodating.
Again, though, the script isn't interested in nuances; it wants the hate to come right into our faces quickly so we can then get to what I think is the real point of the film, which is that everyone is capable of bigotry, and that every person we encounter, every stranger, can affect us in some way, either positively or negatively. What Graham speaks at the beginning is the thesis of the film, in essence, and thus I suppose it's important to look at CRASH as a film of ideas more than people.
It has been said, written, many times by script gurus, film critics, that a movie is allowed one big coincidence in the story; anything beyond that takes advantage of an audience's good graces and intelligence. In Crash, there are dozens. But the fact that it is built on what would be unrealistic coincidences in every day life has been forgiven by most audiences, again, because it is hyper-real.
Of the characters, I found Don Cheadle's Graham and the Latino locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena) the most compelling because the former was harder to get a read on, was more complex than many of the other characters in the film, while the latter was the film's rational/grounded center. These characters, along with Peter, and Terrence Howard's Cameron, work the best because we like them and can't always predict what they're going to say. They rarely feel written. Matt Dillon's racist cop Ryan is a memorable character (and Dillon was first-rate playing him), too, but seemed to be more of a Depiction of a Racist than an actual person. We're supposed to understand - not like, but understand - where he comes from based on one speech to a harried, African-American health care worker (Shaniqua, also a well-drawn character in a few short scenes), explaining his father's sad history.
RYAN:
I'm saying this because I'm really hoping I'm wrong about you. I'm really hoping that someone like yourself, who may have been given a helping hand, might have a little compassion for someone in a similar situation.
He goes on to tell her how his father's lost business to affirmative action. It's a bit of a stretch, but believable from someone like his angry character, and Shaniqua's reaction back is perfectly appropriate: "Your father sounds like a good man. And if he'd come in here today I probably would have approved his request. But he didn't come in, you did. And for his sake, that's a real shame." He's tossed out. It's good drama, even if, again, it feels written.
The other characters are a mixed bag. Howard and Thandie Newton's characters, a black couple struggling with their upper class status, are compelling enough if not completely dimensionalized; the depiction of the Persian family is stronger on generational differences and the struggles of an immigrant to make their life work (not a new theme, mind you), than it is on the dialogue that comes out of their mouths. Farhad in particular talks in angry immigrant-speak. Daniel and his relationship with his young daughter is a sweetly depicted connection, one of the rare Latino characters in a Hollywood film that is a good family man and fleshed out person. Then there's Philippe's cop Hansen, who seems there as if a gamepiece on a gameboard, moved around depending on what is needed in the film. His desire to no longer be Ryan's partner seems appropriate but his scene with Peter near the end of the film, after he picks up the black kid with a heart, is a mistake. Why does he pick him up? Why does he then get paranoid and shoot Peter, who just had a plastic statuette in his pocket?
Because Matt Dillon's Ryan told him he would, a few scenes back, after their partnership had dissolved: "Wait 'til you've been doing it a few more years. You think you know who you are? You have no idea." But the story didn't have room to wait a few more years, so it did it a few scenes later instead.
There are some memorable scenes along the way to that point, including the unforgettably tense sequence in which Dillon's cop ends up saving Newton's character - in another coincidence, the same woman he'd harassed earlier in the film - from the burning wreckage of her car. This scene actually plays better on the screen than it does in the script, but it's clear enough that something transcendent is happening amidst the action. This, and the adjacent scene wherein Howard's Cameron confronts Anthony and Peter after they'd stolen his car, only to have the police try to make heads or tails of the situation (in yet another coincidence, officer Hansen is one of the cops on the scene - LA's a smaller town than I'd realized!). It works because it takes advantage of the complexity, of the layers of irony in race and character set up previously, with a tone of dark comedy. Not all the scenes in the film work this well in this way, alas. The tense scene near the end where Farhad shoots Daniel, only to have Daniel's daughter step in front of the bullet, only to have there not be a bullet because the gun had blanks in it, only because Daniel had told his daughter he gave her a magic cloak that would protect her from bullets... whew. It wasn't quite another "argh" moment for me, but as it was, came off as a mite predictable and melodramatic because of the earlier scene between Daniel and Lara (a nice scene, don't get me wrong).
It's interesting to compare the script for CRASH with that of Stephen Gaghan's SYRIANA, which makes CRASH's multi-character story look like a minimalist play, with layers of complexities. But SYRIANA was deliberately obtuse, reflecting the labyrinthine workings of American foreign policy. Crash is more humanistic, probing into interpersonal relationships and the damaged American zeitgeist.
Still, is this film really superior to John Sayles' LONE STAR, another multi-character film built, as Sayles more recent scripts have been wont to do, around a thesis, but with a little less speechifyin' and which had a gripping central mystery and an entirely believable, realistic love story at its heart? The ultimate reaction to CRASH reminds me a bit of what happened a few years ago with a little film called AMERICAN BEAUTY. I was working as a script reader (basically a glorified intern) before that film came out and recall the words "masterpiece" and "the best script I've read in Hollywood in years" bandied about before I ever took a look at it. Both myself and another reader were disappointed with it - not because it wasn't good, but because it wasn't as stupendous or deep as we'd been lead to believe. When the film came out, we were both wrong, and right. The movie, also an Oscar-winner, is often terrific and the script had many unforgettable moments; it actors like Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening plenty to run with, sharp dialogue, and so on. It also wasn't as deep as it thought it was.
CRASH isn't as deep as it thinks it is, either.
It is however, full of great writing, and like AMERICAN BEAUTY, gives actors room to roam. It has lead to people talking about issues of race after they've seen it, it's forced some Angelenos I know to look at their city with the same detached perspective Canadian emigree Paul Haggis was. And I can tell you from experience, after many self-thwarted attempts, that writing a multi-character drama that creates compelling scenes and palpable tension is no easy feat. Even the aforementioned LONE STAR, supremely crafted though it may be, got lost in itself at times.
Whatever CRASH's flaws, however frustrating portions of it may be, if it got people thinking and talking and debating both the subject of the film, and film itself, I have a harder time arguing against that. Warts and all, CRASH made an impact this year; I only wish it weren't so calculated to do so. Meanwhile, tthe most brilliant American examination of race and crime and urban plight of the last few years wasn't in theaters at all; it's HBO's THE WIRE. For a truthfully presented and complex script, try the first season of THE WIRE - it puts CRASH to shame.
Craig Phillips is a San Francisco-based writer and screenwriter and sometime cartoonist. He also writes and edits for GreenCine.com.
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