RED ENVELOPES: To Live and Die in L.A.

Being a poor year for "important" movies, it was beginning to look like I might not manage to see a single Best Picture Oscar nominee prior to the actual announcements of the nominees. Then we picked up Walk the Line, and I felt like I had at least one under my belt. So when we actually added Good Night, and Good Luck over the weekend, I was feeling pretty good about fulfilling my moviegoer duties.

Of course, they didn't nominate Walk the Line.

Fortunately, we watched Crash the night before.

The fact that this movie came out last May and we're still talking about it is a real tribute to the marketing forces lined up on its behalf. At the time, I remember encountering a brilliant strategy to get the film in the public eye. The studio arranged to run a ten-minute segment from the film on TNT, right in the middle of a block of Law & Order. Talk about a captive audience. And it was interesting enough to keep the film in my mind, even as it staked its claim as a "serious" film, and thus a depressing way to spend two hours at my local cinema.

Having seen it, I realize that depressing is not the right assessment. Crash is a tragic film, as it deals with the way people are ruled by fear, and try to assuage it by lashing out at each other. It's not a particularly hopeful film. But it is invigorating, delving into a diverse collection of characters to see how people play off of each other, completely ignoring a host of similarities in favor of tiny differences.

Screenwriters Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco (Haggis also directed) are working with a huge canvas. Drawing in people from a wide range of racial, economic and educational backgrounds, they throw them all into Los Angeles like bugs in a jar and see what happens. Time and time again, characters are pushed to the edge -- a mild black TV director, a sour white cop, a stressed Iraqi shopkeeper -- and consistently make bad decisions because they are so scared of losing what little they have. And yet those same people are also capable of showing great compassion and love. The ongoing shock of the film is that it accepts the premise that all people are basically good, and tries to illustrate the accumulation of forces that drive them to do horrible things to each other.

It is a huge cast, and a very talented one. Some stories seem to take prominence, but everyone gets a moment to look good and bad. It reminds me in many ways of Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling assembly of suffering characters and one weird night in the Valley. My initial feeling is that Magnolia is a better film, because in many ways that film is actually about the bizarre coincidences it chronicles. It's actually about the people, without the baggage of issues that Crash is forced to carry. But those issues actually make Crash a more admirable film, as it tries to find meaning and understanding in these random connections. So Crash actually occupies a strange middle ground between the character-based Magnolia and an issue-driven, multi-thread story like Traffic or Syriana.

I think Magnolia jumps to mind because of an interesting phenomenon I noticed when that film came out. Improvisers hated it. Relevance? Long-form improvisers work with a form called the Harold, a performance of anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour in which multiple stories interact with each other, often uniting at the end of the piece to form a cohesive whole. So I was baffled when improvisers started slamming Magnolia, a film which -- in my eyes -- used many Harold-like techniques. And like all things that don't actually matter that much, I let my surprise slip away into the back of my mind, until Crash came out and the same damn thing started happening all over again.

The thing is, there is a certain unreality to the proceedings in Crash. For example, a pair of roving commentators cum carjackers, played by Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, accidentally run over a Korean man (who they identify as Chinese). The moment calls for a very quick decision on their part, but they spend a very unreasonable time debating the issue. It's distracting for a second, but I went with it, because it's not wise to take this movie too literally. The pressure has been turned up on all these characters, so I'm willing to give them room. Along the same lines, I didn't even have to think about questioning the logic of so many characters interacting with each other in very coincidental ways. I took it at face value. So why performers who rely on that kind of cleverness onstage reject it so immediately onscreen is not very clear to me.

If my tenure as a high school debater gave me nothing else, it gave me the ability to examine both sides of any issue. Crash is a film that presents its characters as capable of both good and bad, complicated individuals who are doing the best they can, and sometimes do the wrong thing while they're trying to do the right thing. Haggis and Moresco don't have answers. But they find wonderful new ways of looking at the questions. And that's why Crash is sticking with me. And why it's sticking with the Academy eight months after it came out.

A marketing campaign only has to do so much.