Crash - Movie Review Example

Crash (2004) is a movie that presents the story of a group of stranger in Los Angeles, over a period of two days. The movie sends out a strong message about racial discrimination and stereotypes, while exploring the interaction, the conflict, between different races, genders, cultures and classes. Crash about how our lives are intertwined in a mysterious, but logical way and how in the end we all “crash” into each other. In the movie, different people have different experiences which all lead to the buildup of anger, and that is why they misjudge the people next to them, based on prejudice and stereotypes. The movie opens following a car accident involving detective Graham Waters (black) and Ria (Latino), his partner, and Kim Lee (Asian). While the two women exchange racial insults, the detective decides to take a look at the crime scene close by, but he soon gains a horrified face expression. A day earlier, a Persian man and his daughter try to buy a gun, but they face racial discrimination at the shop when the owner refuses to sell it to them; after suffering verbal sexual assaults, Dorri (the daughter) manages to buy the gun and an unspecified type of ammunition. In another part of L.A., Rick Cabot (white), the local district attorney and his wife Jean (white) are carjacked by two black men, Anthony and Peter. When Rick and Jean get home, they decide to change the locks and happen to get a Hispanic locksmith (Daniel) for the job. However, Jean is very frustrated about the earlier incident and insults Michael by calling him a gang member. While the police is looking for the stolen car, the LAPD officer John Ryan and his partner Tom Hansen, both white, spot a car similar to the stolen one and pull it over, despite the fact that the identifications didn’t correspond. The couple in the car, Cameron and Christine (both black) are asked to step aside and Ryan sexually molests Christine, pretending he administers a pat down, while Cameron is forced to watch. At home, Christine is very angry at her husband for his lack of reaction. She tells him that even if he is a successful director at Hollywood, he still “remains black”. Meanwhile, detectives Waters and Ria arrive on a scene of a shooting between two drivers; the surviving one turns out to be an undercover policeman (white), while the dead one was black. Even if detective Waters suspects that the dead back driver was engaged in illegal affairs, he is forced to keep that piece of information to himself by one of Rick Cabot’s councilors, who was trying to win the black vote for the elections. At his home, Daniel tries to comfort his daughter Lara, who was scared of gun shots, by giving her a protective “invisibility impenetrable cloak”; afterwards, he goes out for another job, which happens to be for the Persian shopkeeper; Daniel replaces a lock on a door, but tell the Persian that the door needs to be fixed itself; the shopkeeper doesn’t want to listen, accusing Daniel of cheating. The next day, the shop gets vandalized; the Persian shopkeeper blames Daniel and retrieves his address information from the receipt. In the stolen car, Anthony and Peter get distracted by their argument about racism and run over an Asian man, whom they ultimately decide to drop in front of a hospital. Meanwhile, detective Waters goes visit his mother, a drug addict, who lives by herself and is constantly asking for her other son, Peter. On the other hand, Officer Ryan visits an insurance representative (black) to get an approval for a different medical evaluation for his father, who was suffering great pain because of his mal-diagnosed urinal infection. Unable to solve the matter because of his insulting attitude, Ryan returns to duty, where he is confronted with a car accident. In the car he finds Christine, who was returning home after she visited Cameron at his workplace. Even if at first Christine is terrified and scared when she sees Ryan, he manages to gain her trust and help her get out of the car, just before it explodes. The other police officer, Tom Hansen, helps Cameron in a separate situation, when he gets pulled over, just a little after Anthony and Peter attempt to rob him. Cameron is outraged, and urges Anthony to stop and think about his actions. At her house, Jean is still stressed because of her incident and she falls down some stairs. The only one who is there to take her to the hospital and take care of her is Maria (Hispanic), the housekeeper. In another part of the city, Farhad, the Persian shopkeeper, decides to confront Daniel on the street with a gun, when he returns from work. Watching the scene from the window, his little girl runs to protect her father, by jumping in front of the bullet, but miraculously, she does not get harmed. Farhad believes that he met an angel, but later we find out that the bullets were blanks. While hitchhiking, Peter gets picked up by Tom Hansen. They talk calmly, but then start to argue; Thinking that his Peter is pulling out a gun, Hansen shoots and kills him, but discovers in Peter’s hands just the statuette of Saint Christopher. Peter was trying to show it to Hansen, because the latter had the same one in his care. This way, the story line goes back to the beginning of the movie, where detective Waters discovers his dead brother lying on the ground. Kim Lee, the Asian woman, was rushing to the hospital to see her husband, which Anthony and Peter have run over. While Anthony was trying to sell a white van, he discovers a number of Cambodia refuges in the back. Instead of taking 500$ per each person, as offered, he decides to release them and takes them to China Town. Nearby, another car accident, another “crash” happens. If we take a closer look at the characters, they all struggle between being powerful and powerless in a multicultural society. For example, Officer Ryan is empowered to pull over Cameron and Christine and to treat them like he did, but when he goes to the insurance representative, who is black, to solve his dad’s problem, he gets rejected, and therefore he becomes powerless. However, he is able to leave all prejudice and anger behind when confronted with the car accident and helps Christine to get out of the car safely. At the same time, Christine’s husband, Cameron, is a very successful director at Hollywood and he started to feel equal in status to the white people, until he gets pulled over, emasculated in front of his wife and reminded that he “is, still, black”. The Persian shopkeeper is a pure example of social insecurity, trying to demonstrate that he too, has rights in this society and that no one can cheat him. He takes his blind mistrust towards everyone, even upon the Hispanic locksmith, who was just doing his job. Detective Waters and his brother Peter, as said in the movie, have both had the same opportunities in education, but one has ended up as detective and the other one as thief. Still, even if the first one has a better job, he neglects his family, while the younger brother becomes the mother’s favorite. Unfortunately, he dies because of a misunderstanding, because Officer Hansen gets scared and shoots him; the sad part is that the society, with its stereotypes, made Officer Hansen think that Peter had a gun, while it could have been anything else instead. Besides the tragic outcome, Peter’s death, the movie has some good outcomes as well: Cameron and Christine grow closed to each other and forgive them, Officer Ryan becomes a better person and probably will be less discriminative of other races, Jean, the District Attorney’s wife, realizes that her closest friend is in fact her Hispanic housekeeper. Anthony decides to do a good deed and release the Cambodian prisoners and the Persian shopkeeper, Farhad, gains more confidence in what the society has to offer in the future. Read More