Fear Factor

running on empty: Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon share some sorrow.

Racial fears pull Los Angeles together, and break it apart, in Crash.

by Cindy Fuchs

"See what that woman just did?" Anthony (Ludacris) asks his companion Peter (Larenz Tate). Spotting them from just down the street, "that woman" has clutched her handbag closer and huddled into her husband's side as they head to their shiny black Escalade. Anthony, already exercised because a waitress treated them with no-tip-expecting disdain, is anticipating more of the profiling that he endures every day. Really, he says, because they're the only black men in this white, well-heeled Los Angeles neighborhood, they're the ones who should be scared.

Even aside from the pleasant surprise of Luda's sharp performance, this scene indicates the underlying intelligence of Paul Haggis' Crash, as it both repeats and flips the scripts you know too well. Everyone is scared, everyone expects to be scared and everyone accepts this as the way we live now. That "that woman" happens to be Jean (Sandra Bullock), anxious, angry wife of telegenic district attorney Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) might complicate the situation but doesn't change it fundamentally.

Sprawling and ambitious, episodic and contrived, Crash laces together a series of stories concerning fears and responses. Called to change the locks in Jean's home, where she declares him untrustworthy because he looks like a gang member (that is, Mexican), earnest young locksmith Daniel (Michael Pe–a) returns home to find his 5-year-old daughter hiding under her bed. She's remembering the gunshots that rang through the night in their old neighborhood, and so he bestows on her his "invisible cape," promising it will protect her from harm (potentially precious, this scene ends up being one of the film's most compelling, owing to Pe–a's superbly low-key performance). At the same time, Iranian shopkeeper Farhad (Shaun Toub) is afraid following a robbery. His daughter, Dorri (Bahar Soomekh), tries to calm him by purchasing a gun he can keep in a drawer. In both cases, security is a fantasy; in the face of random violence, you can only hope to survive.

On the other end of this spectrum are the professional protectors: the DA and his overworked team (including efficient assistant Nona Gaye); homicide detectives Graham (Don Cheadle) and Ria (Jennifer Esposito); and uniforms Ryan (Matt Dillon) and his rookie partner, Thomas (Ryan Phillippe). Perpetually vexed by the daily pressures of their jobs, Ria and Graham are engaged in a fraught, if exciting, sexual relationship, their understanding of one another premised in part on the ways others read theirs. When Graham's mother calls during one late-night liaison, she's worried about his missing brother, a young thug on whom she can't help but dote. Frustrated by her singular focus, Graham tries to shock her by announcing that he's "having sex with a white woman." This is too much for the proudly Puerto Rican Ria, who suddenly sees his blinding rage — at mom, women, whiteness, policing, and in a weirdly unfocused way, her. She can't defend herself except by lashing out, and so the night is now upside down, a tryst turned verbal throwdown, wrought in racial epithets.

If Graham and Ria are unable to see one another except through their own expectations, on the other side of town, a parallel scenario unfolds more brutally, as Ryan's anger erupts in a frighteningly aggressive display. He spots a Mercedes pulled over, in which a black couple — TV director Cameron (Terrence Howard) and his wife Christine (Thandie Newton) — are engaged in an after-party blowjob. Undone by his own diurnally scary situation and by the sight of what he takes as unearned and specifically raced privilege (the upending of the order he's expected to work out for him), Ryan explodes, harassing the couple and then molesting Christine (in the guise of searching for weapons) in front of her husband.

That most of the film's subtly or overtly violent encounters has to do with cars lends the film a kind of metaphorical and multicultural rhythm (generally speaking, the film takes up a one-from-every-food-group approach to representation, including a mostly unseen Asian pedestrian hit by a car and dragged beneath). In L.A., of course, cars are everywhere. Emblems of status and mobile privacy, they are also perennial sites for conflict, especially if you're "driving while black." From carjackings to cops stopping suspects to fender benders to cars brutally crashing and literally burning, the film is full of car-oriented encounters, and so characters become entangled.

Crash isn't as egregiously naive or dully well-intentioned as 1991's Grand Canyon, and many of its moments are moving. Still, it seems geared toward those viewers who were surprised by the Rodney King video, that is, people who don't regularly deal with such cultural, legal and emotional collisions. For others, its machinations will grind, instances of trying too hard to point out what's obvious. People are scared.

Crash Written and directed by Paul Haggis A Lions Gate release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended