We all know Crash is an Oscar winner. Ok, an Oscar winner based on race relationships. Hmm, was this a case of the Oscar voters just being politically correct! Or is it really a worthy movie?
These questions lead me into watching this movie.
The movie begins with two black youth walking along a posh, predominantly white neighbourhood discussing how they think they are treated with suspicion by the whites. You tend to empathise with these guys. Afterall we have all faced such situations in our life. Whether it be chavs trying to trip a desi guy or a bunch of desis muttering in hindi when a white guy walks past. Just when you are ready to embrace their thoughts, they pull out a gun and rob a white couple(the attorney general and his neurotic wife).
And then the movie kick starts into full gear.
During the course of the movie we meet with seemingly random characters, each with their own grouse against other races
1) The Iraqi grocer who is striving to meet ends and hires a Mexican locksmith to fix his locks.
2) The high-flying black director with his sexy wife
3) A disgruntled cop with a chronically ill father(Cop1)
4) A freshly minted idealistic cop(Cop2)
5) The aforementioned Mexican locksmith with his lovingly cute daughter, working hard to feed his family.
6) A black cop trying to make up to his mother by searching for his missing brother(Cop3)
7) A chinese couple
8) The attorney general and his wife
At first all these characters seem random, but soon life twists them like puppets.
The directors wife is assaulted by the vindictive cop(Cop1) while stopping them for a routine check. The reason for his vindictiveness is because a black nurse had rejected emergency treatment for his dad(for genuine reasons).
The Mexican locksmith is not able to fix the Iraqi’s lock since his door needs to be changed. Since the lock is not fixed, the store gets vandalised and the poor iraqi loses all his savings. The grocer blames all these mishaps on the Mexican and runs to kill him at his house. Just as he is about to fire on the locksmith, the locksmith’s young daughter runs out to save her dad. The grocer fires and as we think that another innocent life has been lost in vain, we realise that the Iraqi’s doctor daughter has filled his gun with blanks. The kid is not dead after all. The Iraqi does not understand this and believes that it was divine intervention that saved him from committing a murder and goes back truely repentant.
This is a catharsis for both the men. Everywhere else, we see similar acts of catharsis happening.
What goes around comes around and cop1 ends up saving the very woman that he assaulted earlier. The neurotic wife’s life is saved by the very Mexican housemaid she was suspicious of.
The black director helps one of the black youth change his life by tell him how sick he is of idiots like him who reinforce black stereotypes.
There is however one jarring note. Cop2 gives a lift to the first black teenager. when the teenager sees a saint’s statue on the dashboard, he laughs. The cops misinterprets it for a racial taunt and when the kid tries to pull something from his jacket, the cop shoots at him. Unfortunately, he realises that the kid had the same saint’s statue in his jacket. The two young men - one black and the other white, were not so different after all.
Soon we realise that all events in this movie are interlinked. Accident A causes incident B which inturn causes confrontation C.
That is when we realise that everything in this world is not written in black and white. Except for the hopelessly corrupt Attorney General, everyone else had some redeeming quality in him. It is this hope of redemption that keep us ticking.
Full marks to this movie for hitting the bulls eye in this aspect. After coming out of the theaters you understand the significance of the saying "A STRANGER IS JUST A FRIEND WHOM YOU HAVE NEVER MET"
Crash is a movie that shook my view on race relationships and hence I was surprised not to see more reviews on this movie.
There is some wonderful acting, but both by the known and the relatively unknown faces. Overall, well worth a watch.