Crash

This is one you’ll need to see, Bush. It’s an important movie—not one that’s pleasant to watch, by any stretch of the imagination, but one that has a great deal to say about this country and its people. We see ourselves at our very worst, and at our very best. For the first third of the movie, I’ll admit I sat there squirming, mad at the director for subjecting me to what I saw to be a highly contrived specacle of the worst of human behavior, piling coincidence on coincidence simply as a pretext for revealing humanity at its most abject and depraved. Somewhere along the line, however, I got it: this was not so much a “real life” narrative but rather a parable, an exemplary and didactic tale whose contrivances had a moral as well as an aesthetic purpose.

When I talk about a moral purpose, though, I don’t mean that simple distinction between good and evil that I sometimes hear from your lips, Bush—as though the good were all plainly good, and the bad all plainly bad. This film is about moral ambiguity. It’s about rage and violence, and their causes. It’s about racism and social warfare. It’s about immigrants, both legal and illegal. It’s about the abuse of authority and the uncontrollable rage of powerlessness. It’s about the opportunity our society purports to offer to all, and the denial of opportunity to many that goes along with it. It’s about the desire for material well-being, and what humans will resort to in order to achieve it. It’s about villany and heroism, and the narrow divide that separates the two. It’s about our young black men roaming the streets with guns, and our bored suburban wives. It’s about our venal politicians (sorry, Bush!) and our well-meaning social workers. About our callous health and insurance systems, and the desperation of those victimized by them…

I could go on. In short, though, it’s about life in America, and about Americans. Good ones and bad ones. No, that’s not right. It’s about the potential in each one of us for the good and the bad. The good, the bad and the ugly, as that old film title had it. It’s about the rogue, racist cop who has seen it all and isn’t above insulting a mixed-race couple in a traffic stop, feeling up the woman in front of her partner, in a cynical abuse of the power his firepower assures him; and who later finds himself risking his own life to save the same woman from a burning vehicle. It’s about how the woman herself feels about both the violation and the salvation by her victimizer. It’s about a black veteran cop who is forced to compromise his integrity when faced with the choice between promoting a politician’s face-saving lie and saving his brother from a three-times-and-you’re out life sentence.

It’s a film that constantly confronts each one of its characters with impossible moral choices and watches them react. It ends in tragedy for some, and a kind of muted, compromised triumph for others. None of it is easy. As one of the lead characters suggests in the opening sequence, it’s all about the way we come in contact with each other as human beings in today’s complex world. For him, it’s the experience of Los Angeles—the city where we no longer live with that daily touch, brushing up against each other on the sidewalk, in the subway, and end up crashing into each other simply because we miss that touch, and long for it. That’s his metaphor. For the rest of us, watching the film with sometimes unbearable discomfort, it’s a metaphor for our morally challenged lives, no matter whether in Los Angeles or elsewhere in the world.

Let’s not forget, though, the film’s redeeming moments, as when the street gangster restores liberty to a van-load of illegal immigrants, when he could have sold them for five huundred dollars each--men, women, and children. Or the corrupt cop who takes tender care of his unlovable and incapacitated father. Or the bitchy Beverly Hills wife of the venal District Attorney, who comes to recognize that her only true friend is the Salvadoran maid whom she has terribly abused. These scenes offer us a moment’s warmth in this cold, hard look at the real world we have created for ourselves, and a moment of hope for our humanity.

The film ends in a wondrous, impossible snowfall in Los Angeles, a not-to-be-hoped-for ritual of natural purification. A circle of children is seen dancing around the carcass of a burning vehicle--the site of one, last, searing act of moral self-betrayal—in a return to the child’s condition of relative innocence, where good and evil are brought back down to the level of simple mischief, and bring with them less dreadful consequences than do the often tragic choices of adults.

I did not like this film, Bush. It’s not a film that one can easily like. But I do think that it’s a powerful and important exploration of the moral quandaries with which we, as Americans, are faced today. I hope you’ll take the time to see it.