Crash takes place in L.A., a city with no center but a network of highways and suburbs. The story unravels over a 2-day chain-reaction period during which the lives of strangers intersect. A young black man, spouting ideology of black oppression, steals an SUV from a rich white couple. Two policeman hear the APB, and pull over the wrong SUV simply because a black man is driving. One cop harasses the driver and his wife, while his young partner watches horrified. The black couple endures in order to avoid more radical violence. Elsewhere, a Persian man is buying a gun; his adult daughter acts as translator to the suspicious shop-owner. Each scenario ripples out in the lives of the people involved. The SUV thieves get involved in a hit-and-run. The white couple gets home and change their locks. The wife then accuses the Hispanic locksmith of stealing a copy of her keys. The husband, incumbent DA, tries to spin the event to manipulate the black vote in the upcoming election. The black couple escapes more extreme violence, but the wife rages at her husband's passivity. The next day she gets into a car accident. Meanwhile her husband snaps towards violence when the same young black thieves from the previous night try to steal his SUV. The white cop who diffuses the situation is the partner of the racist cop, trying to atone, and still becoming the victim of his own prejudices. The Persian man, who called the same Hispanic locksmith the night before, thinks he was cheated by him and so waits with his gun at the locksmith's home.
The movie reveals the everyday unexamined prejudices we all carry around like concealed weapons that distort our world and make us all liars and cheats. On the surface, Crash is about racism; every character is racist about another racial group. But if you scrape the surface a bit, it turns racism on its head, from a problem "out there" to one inside us all. There are no good characters in this story, but every person is a mixed bag. Most of...