When I first heard about Crash, I thought it was a movie about cars, thanks to the title. A few months ago, we had plans to watch it one evening on DVD but some­thing tran­spired and we landed up gaz­ing at the stars instead! I’m quite glad I didn’t see it then actu­ally. Because I’m still a sucker for larger than life on screen action.

The expec­ta­tions were obvi­ously high after its Oscar win. And I must say, I wasn’t dis­ap­pointed at all. The story and screen­play were bet­ter than any­thing I’ve seen in a while.

The story com­prises of char­ac­ters of diverse racial back­grounds cross paths and ‘crash’ into one another, and the out­come of all these inter­ac­tions is what is por­trayed with great finesse by the direc­tor and writer Paul Hag­gis. The char­ac­ters are real, the sit­u­a­tions are real and all laced with both humour and irony.

The frus­tra­tions and tra­vails of every­day life are man­i­fested as racist atti­tudes, and yet when you scratch deeper, it’s much more than that. Every­day life and the blows it deals to peo­ple take its toll. These peo­ple who then go out into the streets and need some­one else to take it out on. It por­trays how race comes into the way of inter­ac­tions and pre­vents peo­ple from see­ing the actual per­son in front of them. San­dra Bul­lock for exam­ple, thinks the man fix­ing her lock is a part of a gang who will sell dupli­cates of the keys, and is espe­cially rude with her Asian house­help. “I’m angry all time. I wake up in the morn­ing and I’m feel­ing angry,” she con­fessed to a friend. In the end though, it’s the help who comes to Bullock’s aide when she has a nasty fall.

There are many other char­ac­ters includ­ing:
– An old Per­sian shop­keeper who loses every­thing because of his stub­born atti­tude
– A young Mex­i­can man who just wants to keep his daugh­ter safe
– A woman (San­dra Bul­lock) who just wants her politi­cian husband’s atten­tion
– A black woman (Thandie New­ton) who feels betrayed because her hus­band (Ter­ence Howard) couldn’t utter a word while a cop con­ducted a body search
– A cop (Don Chea­dle) who does every­thing and is still not appre­ci­ated by who he cares most about : his mother
– Another frus­trated and racist cop (Matt Dil­lon) who lives with an old ail­ing father

The whole story is put together with the help of sev­eral sub-plots and to the director’s credit, he keeps firm con­trol not let­ting any­one of them get out of hand. Instead, they all inter­sect beau­ti­fully, cre­at­ing a story that is dif­fi­cult to ignore.

You can’t help but feel for Matt Dillon’s char­ac­ter, for Thandie Newton’s humil­i­a­tion and her husband’s quiet anger. Or Don Cheadle’s help­less­ness as the cop who tries every­thing to make his mother happy and yet fails. Her younger thiev­ing son will also be the apple of her eyes. Haven’t we all come across such sit­u­a­tions and such characters?

Paul Hag­gis comes up with an amaz­ing script. Not only do you laugh with the char­ac­ters, you feel what they’re going through. You get involved with the char­ac­ters right from the begin­ning though you have no idea where they’re going next or what they’re going to do!

I absolutely loved the way the char­ac­ters lives inter­spersed and the story comes full cir­cle. A sat­is­fy­ing and most well made film. I haven’t seen Broke­back Moun­tain yet, but this one is def­i­nitely worth the nom­i­na­tion it received!