Crash

Crash, American dramatic film, released in 2004, that was written and directed by Paul Haggis and that won the Academy Award for best picture in what was widely thought to be an upset over critical and popular favourite Brokeback Mountain. Set in Los Angeles, Crash is a series of confrontations and collisions between a broad cross section of people who harbour race-based misconceptions about one another.

The film opens on the aftermath of a car crash: A car on its way to an investigation and driven by a Hispanic police detective, Ria (played by Jennifer Esposito), with her African American partner, Detective Graham Waters (Don Cheadle), has just been rear-ended by a car driven by an Asian American driver, Kim Lee (Alexis Rhee). Waters approaches a crime scene involving a dead man while Ria and Kim exchange racial insults. The movie then moves to the events of the previous day, starting in a gun store where a Persian shop owner, Farhad (Shaun Toub), is trying to buy a gun. When he speaks with his daughter, Dorri (Bahar Soomekh) in Fārsī, the white gun shop owner has him thrown out but sells the gun to the daughter. In the next scene, two young Black men—Anthony (played by rapper Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate)—leave a restaurant, complaining of racial discrimination. After a white couple, district attorney Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) and his wife, Jean (Sandra Bullock), exhibit fear when they pass the young men, Anthony and Peter carjack the Cabots’ SUV. Later, a Hispanic locksmith, Daniel (Michael Peña), arrives to change the locks on the Cabots’ house, but Jean assumes that Daniel is likely to be a gangbanger and wants the locks changed again. In a diner, white police officer John Ryan (Matt Dillon) calls an African American HMO administrator, Shaniqua Johnson (Loretta Devine), about pain medication for his father, without success. He and his white partner, Tom Hansen (Ryan Phillippe), leave the diner and pull over an SUV containing an African American couple, TV director Cameron Thayer (Terrence Howard) and his wife, Christine (Thandie Newton). Cameron is deferential but Christine is argumentative, and Ryan molests and humiliates her while patting her down. The locksmith Daniel goes home to find his young daughter, Lara (Ashlyn Sanchez), hiding under her bed, afraid that a bullet from a shooting in the neighbourhood they moved from will find her; Daniel devises an invisible (and imaginary) cloak of protection for her. Anthony and Peter, while driving in the stolen SUV, accidentally run over an Asian man while passing a white van; they take the injured man to a hospital. Daniel is hired to fix the lock on the front door of Farhad’s shop, but Farhad thinks that Daniel is trying to cheat him when Daniel tells him that the door itself needs to be replaced.

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The following day Farhad discovers that his shop has been broken into and vandalized with anti-Arabian graffiti. When he learns that his insurance company will not pay for the damage to the shop because his door is inadequate, he decides that this is Daniel’s fault. Officer Ryan visits Shaniqua in her office, but his racism causes her to throw him out. Ryan then comes upon a car accident, with a victim trapped in an upside-down car. The trapped person, Christine Thayer, recognizes him when he approaches and does not want him touching her, but he manages to pull her free of the car just before it bursts into flames. Anthony and Peter later attempt to carjack Cameron, but he fights back. When a police car approaches, Peter flees, and both Anthony and Cameron get into Cameron’s SUV. Cameron drives off, still scuffling with Anthony, and he eventually takes Anthony’s gun. Police cars surround the SUV, and Anthony hides but Cameron gets out and is confrontational toward the police officers, one of whom is Hansen. Hansen calms Cameron down and persuades the other officers to let him go. Cameron gives Anthony his gun back and drops him off at a bus stop. Farhad confronts Daniel with a gun outside his home, and Lara runs out with the invisible cloak of protection and leaps into her father’s arms just as Farhad fires the gun. The gun, however, is loaded with blanks, and no one is hurt. Later, Hansen picks up Peter, who is hitchhiking, but when Peter reaches into his pocket, Hansen thinks that he is reaching for a gun and kills him. He pushes Peter’s body out of the car and sets the car on fire. Detective Waters arrives on the scene where Peter’s body has been found (the opening scene of the film); Peter, it turns out, is Waters’s brother. Anthony finds a white van with the keys in the ignition and steals it. He drives it to a chop shop, where several Cambodian refugees are found chained inside the van. Anthony then takes the van to the Chinatown neighbourhood and releases the Cambodians. A minor fender bender occurs nearby, and one of the drivers is Shaniqua.

While many critics and viewers were favourably impressed with Crash, others found the film to be manipulative and contrived and noted that the characters were themselves racial stereotypes. Writer Paul Haggis also wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, which won the Oscar for best picture the previous year, and with the Academy Award for Crash he became the first screenwriter to have written back-to-back best picture winners. Although Crash opened in 2004 at the Toronto International Film Festival, it did not go into wide release until 2005.

Production notes and credits

• Studios: Bob Yari Productions, DEJ Productions, Blackfriars Bridge Films, Harris Company, ApolloProScreen Filmproduktion, and Bull’s Eye Entertainment
• Director: Paul Haggis
• Writers: Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco
• Music: Mark Isham

Cast

• Don Cheadle (Graham Waters)
• Jennifer Esposito (Ria)
• Shaun Toub (Farhad)
• Bahar Soomekh (Dorri)
• Ludacris (Anthony)
• Larenz Tate (Peter)
• Brendan Fraser (Rick Cabot)
• Sandra Bullock (Jean Cabot)
• Matt Dillon (John Ryan)
• Ryan Phillippe (Tom Hansen)
• Terrence Howard (Cameron Thayer)
• Thandie Newton (Christine Thayer)
• Michael Peña (Daniel)
• Ashlyn Sanchez (Lara)
• William Fichtner (Flanagan)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*
• Supporting actor (Matt Dillon)
• Direction
• Editing*
• Music (original song: “In the Deep”)
• Writing*