Crash

Herald rating: * * * * *

Night, just before Christmas, in Los Angeles. There's a car crash, attended by Graham (Don Cheadle), a black plain-clothes cop.

His take is that in New York you walk around and brush into people, but in LA you drive around and nobody touches you - until you crash into them.

Now the movie backtracks over the previous 36 hours to examine the relationships between a group of apparently random Los Angelenos.

The unspoken connection and disconnection between them will turn out to be that most burning of US issues: race.

Among a baffling catalogue of characters, an Iranian shopkeeper is paranoid because, since September 11, he is looked on as an Arab. He buys a gun and, for no good reason, develops a hatred for a Mexican locksmith.

Two gun-toting blacks carjack a white district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his wife (Sandra Bullock). He worries this will damage his re-election campaign; she retreats further from the world.

An old, angry cop (Matt Dillon) baits and splits a middle-class black couple, to the embarrassment of his recently recruited partner.

A Chinese hit-run victim turns out to be a people-smuggler. A white undercover cop kills a black cop because he suspects he's a drug dealer.

Meanwhile Graham is having an affair with a Latin cop, supporting his sick mother and trying to handle his crim brother.

This metaphor for conflicts bedevilling modern societies - and not only the US, as witness talkback rants over the cartoon debate - is a triumph for Paul Haggis, the director and co-writer, who earlier penned Million Dollar Baby.

It deserves to be nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, though it is unlikely that the wider academy will have the nerve to follow through with film's greatest prize.

Reminiscent of Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia in its sprawling vision and sometimes too-cute interplay of characters and situations, Crash is brave and provocative.

If you see only one of this year's Oscar contenders - make it this one.

The DVD extras hone in on the film's social issues, with co-writer Bobby Moresco explaining that he opted for politically incorrect dialogue because that's the way that people tend to speak.

In his commentary with Cheadle and Moresco, Haggis reveals that he was carjacked about 10 years ago, and drew on that experience. After typical galleries on characters, casting and editing, it closes with Kansascali's If I ... music video.

* DVD, video rental today