Photo by Lorey Sebastian

As one who fidgeted through Million Dollar Baby wondering
what all the palaver was about, I wasn’t expecting much more than ordinary competence
from Crash, the directing debut of Clint Eastwood’s screenwriter, Paul Haggis.
Even during the jumpy opening sequences of this wonderfully skittish riff on
a long dark night of the Los Angeles soul, in which members of L.A.’s major
ethnic groups hurl invective and more at each other with blithe abandon, I was
poised to dismiss what promised to be another in the long line of drearily topical
actioners that boil our overexposed city down to the sum of its color lines.

In fact, Crash — which, post–Cronenberg’s adaptation of
J.G. Ballard’s novel, surely deserves a more original title — is not just one
of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with Collateral, one of
the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period. Fresh as a daisy,
unencumbered by genre and corrosively funny (Haggis co-wrote the vivacious screenplay
with Bobby Moresco, who, like so many Hollywood Turks today, comes out of hipster
TV), the film appears on casual inspection to be a kind of six degrees of racial
separation, whose dominant mood is unbridled fury played for both entertainment
and tragedy. It begins as it ends, with the discovery by two cops (played by
Don Cheadle and Jennifer Esposito, who are also lovers in the movie) of a man’s
body sprawled beside a freeway, then jogs back 24 hours to the events that led
to his death. Fast and fluidly paced, the movie traffics in a kind of nervous
brinkmanship rotated among encounters between Angelenos whose only common bond
is that they’re trying to rub along in the same geographical space. An Iranian
shop owner (Shaun Toub) feuds with his Mexican locksmith (Michael Peña).
Two respectably dressed young African-Americans (Larenz Tate, and musician Chris
“Ludacris” Bridges, spinning gold from his first acting role) banter
their way through the Grove griping about whites stereotyping black men as criminals,
then coolly hijack the car of a well-heeled district attorney (Brendan Fraser)
and his paranoid wife (Sandra Bullock). A redneck cop with a vile temper (beautifully
played by Matt Dillon) openly harasses an affluent black couple (Terrence Howard
and Thandie Newton) whom he has caught engaging in the only kind of sex you
can have with reasonable safety while driving an SUV. As the night wears on,
more fights erupt, and the crucible of threat, paranoia and simmering violence
heats up to boiling point.

Haggis has claimed that Crash is less about race than
about the frayed nerves and mistrust that shape our public encounters in the
wake of the 9/11 disaster. Perhaps, but he was inspired by an incident in which
he himself fell victim to a carjacking, and plotwise the film suggests the less
sexy but, for my money, far more plausible theory that we are being driven to
the brink by traffic, and by the pathological isolation of living in an atomized
city where what passes for public life is conducted from one car window (or,
in one terrifyingly funny scene, undercarriage) to the next. Haggis caters to
no racial pieties, left, right or center. Instead, all his deeply prejudiced
characters get their due as individuals struggling to carve decent lives out
of chaos. A bad guy cares tenderly for a sick parent; a pillar of the law neglects
a troubled sibling; a peaceable but unhinged shopkeeper finds himself toting
a gun; a Mexican-American father patiently soothes his little girl, who’s freaked
by having witnessed a bullet whiz through her bedroom window; a self-involved
Brentwood matron learns the hard way that her only true friend is her Latina
maid.

Haggis doesn’t take prejudice or discrimination lightly, but
he does grasp the difference between the two, and the oddly hopeful fact that
there will always be a gap between what both liberals and racists say and what
they find themselves doing under duress. In Crash, ethnic prejudice is
a cover for the communal loneliness and mistrust of strangers that will always
cloud the life of a city devoid of benign public spaces for people to meet each
other. Warm and worldly-wise, Haggis seems to argue that the situation is hopeless,
but not serious. Like his hapless characters, yelling and blustering their way
from one crisis to the next, none of us knows what we are capable of until our
mettle is tested, and things can go either way. Terrible things happen here,
but though Crash bows out with yet another screaming match between two
commuters of different ethnic origins, it’s far from being a pessimistic work.
Indeed, the movie maps out an intriguing urban polity common to all decaying
cities, whose vigor comes to depend not on institutions that don’t work or don’t
care, but on individuals rising ad hoc to all manner of occasions, even ones
that involve risking their lives for others they claim to despise. In answer
to the plaintive Rodney King question that ricocheted all over the city after
the 1992 riots, Haggis insists not that we can get along, but that somehow,
person by person, no matter how inflammatory the racial rhetoric, we sort of
do.

CRASH | Directed by PAUL HAGGIS | Written by HAGGIS and
BOBBY MORESCO | Produced by CATHY SCHULMAN, DON CHEADLE, BOB YARI, MARK R. HARRIS,
MORESCO and HAGGIS | Released by Lions Gate Films | Citywide

Deftly folded into the extraordinary documentary Another Road
Home are an official story and an unofficial one, each with its own calculus
of love and pain, braided together with uncommon delicacy and courage by filmmaker
Danae Elon. The Israeli-born Elon comes furnished and burdened with an illustrious
pedigree. Her father is Amos Elon, a journalist and author whose influential
1971 book The Israelis: Founders and Sons, a dog-eared copy of which
has followed me across three continents, was one of the first to lay it on the
line that Israel’s victory over the Arabs in the 1967 Six Day War represented
a fateful souring of labor-Zionist ideals that has brought Israelis and Palestinians
to their current standoff. To judge by Another Road Home, in which he makes
more than one crankily charismatic appearance, Elon was a better historian,
and very likely a better husband to his literary-agent wife, Beth, than he was
a father to Danae. The legacy of a parent at once remote and overwhelming is
etched into his daughter’s soft, doelike features, bright with the hyperalert
blend of vulnerability and rebelliousness characteristic of many children who
grow up hungering for parental recognition.

Danae’s tangled family nexus doubtless also nurtured in her an
urgent affinity for the oppressed, a quality that hums along beneath her roundabout
quest to regain contact with Musa, a Palestinian Arab who took care of her in
Jerusalem from babyhood until she moved to Manhattan to attend film school at
NYU. Because of the security situation in the occupied territories, direct communication
seemed impossible, but Danae tracked down the six sons Musa sent to America
for a better life to Paterson, New Jersey, today notorious for having harbored
9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta. Through them, she manages to arrange for Musa
to come to America, then ups the ante by inviting her reluctant folks to join
the party.

Behind the courteous affection and all too mildly expressed anger
and pain of their dialogue (one son wistfully points out that Musa poured more
devotion into Danae than he did into his own offspring) hang painful parallels
and contrasts all the more powerful for the fact that Danae doesn’t press the
issue. In her father’s reflexive response when she first broaches the meeting
(“Are these people extremists? Do they have beards? Are they suicide bombers?”),
one sees not the leftist champion of Israel’s Arab minority, but a frightened
old man who gives voice to the pervasive post-Intifada Israeli mistrust of the
Other with whom they must share space. Today Amos Elon lives in comfortable
self-exile in Italy, while Musa, as we see in his return journey (accompanied
by Danae) to his village in the occupied territories, lives out a daily nightmare
of roadblocks and curfews. You’d never know it from observing this serene, dignified
old gentleman, who still clucks over Danae’s welfare and, when she asks how
it had felt for him to iron her army uniform in the old days, replies with the
wisdom of the ages, “I didn’t do it for the army. I did it for you.”
In its unobtrusive way, this marvelously conciliatory film teaches a lesson
that all parties to the Middle East conflict would be wise to take to heart
— that even with the truces and treaties and fresh political starts, in the
end it will only be warm bodies like Musa and Danae who can show their feuding
countrymen another road home.

ANOTHER ROAD HOME | Directed and produced by DANAE ELON
| Released by Qi Film and GeoQuest Entertainment Group Ltd. | At the Music Hall

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