. . . Into Me (I Can Not Hear the Title without then Hearing that Lyric)

Saw Crash on DVD, and it's a keeper, a great film, and easily one of the best I've seen in a long while. A quick synopsis is very hard to do given the number of characters and the intertwining plots, but basically a group of people in Christmastime LA, including a white cop and his younger partner, a black television director and his black wife, a black detective and his Hispanic partner, an Iranian man and his wife and daughter, a Hispanic locksmith and his family, a pair of black twenty-somethings, the white DA (assistant DA?) and his white wife, and a middle-aged Korean couple (among others) interact in fateful and star-crossed ways over the course of a single day. If my descriptions of the characters didn't tip you off, the thread tying everything together is racism, and more or less none of the characters get off scot-free in that regard. The movie, as honestly as any recent film I can recall, examines race in America, but more critically the ways in which different races react to each other and in the different assumptions one race makes about another can be proven or disproven in an instant, or by the same person in the same way. All the characters, to varying degrees, evidence racism in their actions and in the way they interact with each other, but to say that the movie's premise is "everyone is racist and that's OK" would be grossly wrong. The movie isn't "saying" anything in that sense, but is with great economy and art examining the racism that lies underneath us all.

The movie works because it marries good old-fashioned plotting - questions brought up early become important later, props presented in Act One reappear at critical moments in Act Three, characters tie together in surprising ways--with a wonderfully unforced, un-"arty" naturalistic style. The dialogue, the shots themselves, even the low-key electronic score evoke a very realistic sense and mood. The result is an honest film with wonderful dialogue and multi-faceted characters that plays like melodrama; call it honestly-arrived-at melodrama.

I won't go into any plot details, because much of the joy of the film is discovering the characters' stories and intersections, but I will say that the acting is uniformly excellent. Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe, Jennifer Esposito, Ludacris, Brendan Fraser, Michael Pena, Larenz Tate, and a host of others do selfless work, with no one character or actor taking the forefront, in terms of story time or screen impact; this is a true ensemble. And look out for a cameo by, of all people, Tony Danza, who in just a few short minutes actually does a wonderful job of establishing his character. Is Tony Danza an underrated actor? Paul Haggis, who wrote and directed, has impressed me hugely in the past few months (he also wrote the screenplay for the marvelous Million Dollar Baby, which I wrote about here), and I'm anxious to see what he does next.

Until Whenever