Crash Literary Elements

Paul Haggis

Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Shaun Toub, Brendan Fraser, Michael Peña, Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard, Larenz Tate, Ludacris

Jennifer Esposito, William Fichtner, Keith David, Loretta Devine, Tony Danza, Bruce Kirby, Jack McGee, Bahar Soomekh

Drama, Crime, Thriller

English

Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing

May 6, 2005

Don Cheadle, Paul Haggis, Mark R. Harris, Cathy Schulman, Bob Yari

Present-day Los Angeles (2004)

There is no narrator. The story is told through multiple points of view, including those of Detective Graham Waters, Farhad (a convenience store owner), Peter and Anthony (two young carjackers), District Attorney Rick Cabot and his wife Jean, Daniel (a locksmith), Cameron Thayer (a television producer) and his wife Christine, and LAPD officers Jon Ryan and Tom Hansen.

The film's tone is unwaveringly serious. The mood, shaped by the film's haunting soundtrack, is disorienting, painful, and angry.

The film is supported by an ensemble cast. Depending on the given episode, each character takes the role of both protagonist and antagonist.

There is no singular moment of conflict throughout the film. Rather, conflict is continuous and based on issues of race, morality, and action versus inaction.

Though each episode has its own climactic moment, Farhad's fight with Daniel is climactic in terms of the film's pacing. After this moment, many of the conflicts that drive other episodes begin to be resolved.

In the opening sequence, we arrive at the site of Graham and Ria's car crash. Upon exiting the vehicle, Graham finds a grey Puma shoe in the brush on the roadside. This scene foreshadows the discovery of the death of Graham's brother Peter. In addition, Officer Ryan foreshadows that Officer Hansen is more bigoted than he thinks himself to be.

Until the very end of the film, we are unaware of two important details. Firstly, we do not know that Dorri has replaced the bullets in Farhad's gun with blanks. Secondly, we are unaware that Peter is Graham's brother. Haggis understates these two details and creates dramatic tension when they are revealed.

The relationships that Peter shares between his brother, Graham, and his driver, Officer Hansen, allude to the iconography of the Saint Christopher statuette that he carries with him.

Car crashes provide parallelism throughout the plot. We learn that collisions allow each character to move beyond their egocentric frames of mind and interact with others. In this regard, "crashing" manifests symbolically during the film. The appearance of car crashes during the film's opening and closing scenes reveal that racial bigotry runs deeply in American society.