Finally, belatedly, I got around to viewing Crash, not the Cronenberg film from the J.G. Ballard book of the same name, but Paul Haggis’ film from last year, starring Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Brendan Fraser & a host of others. It’s an effective & moving ensemble piece, but so familiar that I had to rent Robert Altman’s 1993 Short Cuts to double check my vision. I was right – in many ways, they’re the same movie. But it’s the differences that are telling.

Both are “ensemble projects” set in Los Angeles around large casts portraying almost uniformly dysfunctional human beings. An automobile accident narratively is the key event in each film. And both make use of first-rate actors in projects where nobody gets to take a star turn, unless possibly it’s Alex Trebek’s one scene in Short Cuts portraying himself. In each film, one of the secondary plot lines appears to show someone getting away with homicide, and in neither case is the killer one of the narratively evil characters. In fact, in each film the “worst” person is involved in a rescue, revealing them to be something less of a monster than they may have been previously portrayed. In Crash, this theme is hammered home by having it occur not once, but twice. The bad cop rescues the very same woman he sexually molested the night before from a flaming auto wreck; the gangbanger auto thief (rapper Ludacris) refuses the small fortune ($500 a head) he is offered by the chop shop owner for a vanload of illegal immigrants he has inadvertently kidnapped while boosting a van, turning the bewildered Asians loose in the streets of Chinatown & even giving them some money. In fact, one could say it occurs two more times, as the gangbanger himself is rescued after one of his carjack victims, the TV producer played by Terrence Howard, who failed to protect his wife the night before from the marauding hands of Matt Dillon, refuses to turn Ludacris into the LAPD. The producer in turn is rescued by Dillon’s good cop/rookie ex-partner.

But that’s pretty much where the similarities stop. The “rescue” in Short Cuts is nothing more than its bad cop – great rep you got there, LAPD – Tim Robbins finds & returns the yapping pooch he had deliberately “lost” in another neighborhood the previous day. And Short Cuts is a satire played with a heavy hand, while Crash proposes itself as a more serious fable. Both have social commentary at the heart of their project – Crash wants it to be taken seriously, Short Cuts is a more cynical film – it thinks the problem as it sees it is beyond repair.

Crash in a way is much clearer about what it thinks this problem is – free floating anger, that motivates every single character in this film. Matt Dillon can’t get his ailing father his medicine from the inept bureaucracy of his HMO, so he takes his frustration out on the first people he sees – a black TV producer whose wife was giving him a blow job as they returned home from a party. The gangbangers confront racism on the streets of Westwood, which they use to excuse their theft of cars. The owner of the little Persian shop can’t communicate clearly with the owner of the gun shop & nearly gets thrown out of the store, leaving his college educated daughter to buy the ammunition. Later, when his locksmith tells him he can’t fix the lock on the store’s back door properly because the problem isn’t the lock, it’s the deteriorating door itself, the Persian calls him a thief. The Latino locksmith has already heard as much from Sandra Bullock, wife of the DA, as she has the locks on their doors changed after she and her husband had their car hijacked by the gangbangers. When the Persian’s store is trashed, the word “Arab” scrawled across its walls, he blames the locksmith and takes the gun to go off & shoot him. But when he gets ready to pull the trigger, the locksmith’s five-year-old daughter jumps in the way. It’s an echo of the about-to-turn-eight-year-old child of the News Anchor who runs in front of diner waitress Lily Tomlin’s car in Short Cuts.

Short Cuts, based on the stories of Raymond Carver, sees pretty much everything in terms of gender relations & alcohol. At least half of the characters in the film are alcoholics, most are unfaithful to their partners, whether this is treated in broadly comic turns, as when the cop’s mistress spends the weekend with her other lover (while her ex-husband systematically destroys her furniture & clothing, slicing everything in half), or with somewhat more painful realism, as when Julianne Moore (the sister-in-law of the cop), admits to her husband that, yes, she fucked Mitchell Anderson at a party three years ago, just as he’s always suspected. That scene is drawn out, with Moore naked from the waist down for much of it, a sharp contrast with most of the rest of that picture.

Crash has a completely different analysis. For it, race is the dynamic factor. Either race is the cause of all this anger, or – more accurately – it’s the focal point, the place in which it’s allowed to come out & flow all over other people, the weak point in the levee of social relations. When rich bitch Sandra Bullock, who has badmouthed every person of color she’s seen for two days after her carjacking, falls downstairs, nobody will come to help her but her maid. Bullock, whose husband is portrayed as the shallowest of politicians – he has to given award to a black cop to expiate the political problem caused by his having been robbed by blacks the night before – is given the film’s topic sentences, narratively one of its few serious weak points. When she calls to explain what’s happened to her husband, he looks knowing at his black female assistant. My wife insists that that look has to be read as a sign that the D.A. is banging his aide & I tend to think she’s correct. The cop he wants to reward, Don Cheadle, has a junky mother and a brother who, by the film’s end, is dead at the hands of the anti-racist good cop.

Both films make the argument that people, or at least adults, are walking wounded, wherever they go. Neither blames the dimensions on which they focus for this wound, as such – Matt Dillon’s problem has more to do with capitalist power relations in late modern society, the programs that overtook his father’s marginal business, the rules of the HMO designed to minimize its responsibility to treat pain if pain should cost – but both explore how this woundedness is expressed through race or gender. I started to add alcohol to that list as well, but I actually don’t think Short Cuts has any coherent perspective on this – it’s characters are self-medicating through booze as best they can, but at most the alcohol is shown to blunt emotions & reactions. Thus Annie Ross blows off her daughter’s distress at the neighbor boy’s death, a reaction that triggers an even more baleful consequence, but it’s little more than a detail here.

Long term, Robert Altman is a far greater director than Paul Haggis ever will be, but Short Cuts is not The Player, Nashville nor Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean – for my money, Altman’s best pictures. It’s as if he’s telling a story, wants to focus on these dimensions of it, yet doesn’t really have a story to tell, only a series of interconnected actions. Crash is 76 minutes shorter than Short Cuts & may have fewer characters, fewer plotlines, but overall it has a lot more to say.