One of the Best Movies I've Ever Seen

"In LA, nobody touches you. We miss that so much, we crash into each other just so we can feel something." -Don Cheadle in Crash.

Crash is just the movie I've been looking for, maybe my whole life. I was browsing through movies at the store with my mother and complained to her that now I have this unlimited rental pass, there's nothing I want to watch. Sure, there are plenty of movies I have never seen that I could choose, most of them in the category of "everybody's seen that." For example, I passed by Predator and thought to myself, "I've never actually seen all of that," but still by-passed it. I told Mom, "I need something to deeply move me, to awaken me to some truth."

Crash is just that. It is the collision of the lives of a dozen or so people in Los Angeles within a 3-day period. The plot therefore, is almost impossible to describe. I can tell you it is a sociologist's triumph. It primarily concerns itself with personal fears and biases and how these feelings affect our dealings with other people. A theme of the movie seems to be that of communication breakdown. People say things they don't mean to say; other people understand things that aren't intended to be communicated. As a result, the single biggest issue in the movie is stereotyping, specifically, racial stereotyping. A man running for district attorney wants a picture with a black man to increase the black vote and chooses a man who is actually Arabic, merely dark-skinned, but not black. A woman concludes that a locksmith at her house will keep a copy of the keys to her house and share with his friends because he is a "Hispanic gangster"...who actually turns out to be a decent family man. A frustrated man on the phone with an insurance provider asks for the name of the lady he is speaking with; when she gives her ethincally African-American-sounding name, he says, "I should have known your name was Shaniqua."

I have never seen a movie to so poignantly display human conflict. I felt my muscles tense up because I realized how real these situations were. The movie shows how small misunderstandings can turn into deadly problems. What start out as minor altercations among characters eventually result in life-or-death situations. In the beginning of the movie, each of the main characters feels belittled, stereotyped, discriminated against, victimized, or otherwise abused. By the end, each character realizes ways in which he/she has belittled, stereotyped, discriminated against, victimized, or otherwise abused others. The line between victim and aggressor becomes blurred. Self-interest creates a world of chaos and clamor.

WARNING: PLOT SPOILER BELOW.

My two favorite situations (and the most emotionally stirring) follow below:

1. A white cop pulls over a black man and his white wife for performing a sexual act in their vehicle. The husband apologizes profusely, but the cop forces them to both get against their car. He then has his assistant pat down the husband while he pats down the wife for weapons. He uses this as an excuse to grope the woman, while she cries and her devastated husband looks on in humiliation. Back at home, the wife accuses her husband for standing up to the cop. The next day, the wife is in a bad vehicle accident in which the car overturns. The same white cop approaches the overturned vehicle and goes inside to pull the victim out. Soon he realizes who she is the woman he groped the night before, and she realizes he is the one who humiliated her. She screams for him to keep his hands off her. You can see the shock in his eyes as he says he's not going to touch her. There is no one else on the scene, so eventually he convinces her to allow him to help her out. As the car suddenly starts burning, other cops show up to pull the guy from the car, but he jumps back into the car and barely helps the woman escape in the nick of time.

2. A Hispanic locksmith tucks his daughter in bed late at night. She is scared because they used to live in a bad neighborhood where a bullet came through her window. To comfort her, the man tells her a story about a fairy who gave him an invisible bulletproof cloak when he was a child. He pretends to put it on her and tells her she will be invincible as long as she wears it. The next day the man tries to repair the lock at an Arabic man's shop. He advises the shop owner to replace the door, since fixing the lock is insufficient. The Arab accuses the locksmith of copping out and when profanity and epithets ensue, the locksmith, offended, leaves. Later that night, the shop owner's shop is broken into, and his livelihood ruined. He blames the locksmith for not just replacing the lock, finds his address and drives to the man's house. He points a gun at the locksmith, demanding money in payment for his loss. A heated altercation ensues, with the man's finger on the trigger. The locksmith's daughter, from inside, says, "Oh no, Daddy doesn't have the cloak!" She runs outside and jumps into her dad's arms to protect him, as the shop owner pulls the trigger. For a moment, the dad screams. It appears his little girl has been shot dead. Then she says she jumped in the way since she was wearing the cloak to save Dad. The Arab somehow missed when he shot. Coming back to his senses, he walks away in disbelief at his own actions.

Some characters are not so lucky...there are deaths. But surprisingly this violent film is an anti-violence one. One by one, we see the characters put their guns away (even policemen) realizing that violence really doesn't solve any problems. And neither does making unwarranted assumptions about another person's character.