Movie Review

Directed by Paul Haggis, Starring Don Cheadle (Graham), Terrence Howard (Cameron), Thandie Newton (Christie) and Matt Dillon (Officer Ryan), 100 minutes, 2004.

Fear pervades the lives of these disparate characters who intersect in random ways. However, the miraculous shimmers just below the surface of these random encounters providing a sense of meaning through the choices they make. There is freedom to make right choices and freedom to make wrong choices and one of the paradoxical themes of the movie is that some good people make bad, impulsive choices and criminals make choices for good. A car thief always puts a St. Christopher medal on the dash of stolen cars! The divine is present even in the face of bad choices.

Graham is a detective in the LAPD and he opens the movie by saying that we feel so cut off from each other, so estranged from life, that in our desperate need to feel connection, sympathy and affection we literally crash into each other to feel the warmth of human touch. In Romans 8:18-25 Paul uses the image of a groaning creation, groaning humankind, to highlight the estrangement and suffering that lies at the heart of human experience. For Paul it is The Spirit who groans within us and that longing points to a hope filled future.

All the characters in the story live in fear, fear of being cheated, fear of other races, fear of illness and death. Officer Ryan is one of the most morally complex. He's a racist and acts despicably. Yet we see him taking tender care of his sick father and doing battle with an unfeeling HMO all the while fearful of being engulfed by affirmative action programs that advance incompetent people. In one scene he pulls over a black couple (Cameron and Christie) in their expensive SUV even though he knows they are not in the recently stolen SUV he seeks. He sexually gropes Christie as he frisks her while Cameron stands by helplessly. Later, in one of the many scenes of 'coincidence' these two characters meet again when Christie overturns her car in a serious accident. She is pinned in the car and gas is leaking. Ryan comes across the accident and attempts a rescue. They recognize each other in the intimacy of a very dangerous situation and Christie is adamant that he not touch her, indeed not even try to rescue her .The rescuer is the one who has caused such pain and grief in her marriage and her life. It is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The One in the Ditch, so desperate for rescue, would rather die than be touched by the Unclean Samaritan. Grace strikes those in no position to expect it and who would rather refuse it if they could. When Christie is being led away from the accident she and Ryan look at each other, having confronted their fears of each other and they (and we) know that something profoundly spiritual has occurred.

In the story, characters choose to act in ways that interconnect their lives and one thing leads to another. There is an underlying sense of the miraculous, as if something larger is really taking place. The film works because the characters are not clichés even when they relate to each other out of the fears and stereotypes our culture fosters. Like us they are deeply flawed and profoundly grace-full. They groan for a connection that is not limited by fear. Just as in real life its own self, "Crash" intimates that something (Someone) larger than ourselves may be groaning, may be striking with grace, to draw out our full humanity.