Every time I go to visit family in North Carolina, I'm always struck by how much different race relations are in at least the cosmopolitan south from the way they are here in the much-maligned "liberal northeast." There's a saying that the difference between the north and the south is that in the north they don't care how big black people get as long as they don't get too close, and in the south they don't care how close black people get as long as they don't get too big. That said, there seems to be an ease between races in the south that comes as a surprise to those of us northerners more accustomed to patting ourselves on back for how liberal we are.

Macky Alston's 1996 documentary Family Name was shown as part of the recent Full Frame Fest's Southern Sidebar series. Alston, who spent part of his childhood in the Pittsboro, NC area, had always wondered why so many black children at his school had the same name. Many years later, he embarked on a quest to try to find at what point what he believed to be a biracial family tree started. What surprised me, watching Alston's film, was how strongly he expected the black Alstons to still carry rage at the "Chatham Jack" Alston, the blustering antebellum slaveowner and Macky Alston's great great great great great Uncle, who may be the common link among the many Alstons, both white and black, in that area of North Carolina. What he instead found, among both white and black Alstons, was a sense that what's past is past. It seemed to me that there is a kind of acceptance of the past in the south that is lacking in the north, perhaps due to the constant reminders of the south's heritage of slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow. Here in the industrial northeast, the shared racial experience is virtually nil. Black and white northeasterners live in separate areas of towns, go to separate schools, and rarely socialize among each other. For all that we like to feel superior to the south in terms of race relations, I wonder sometimes if the more enlightened areas of the south, in facing its own troubled past, are better able to move forward to forge something new.

I thought the many black Alstons that Macky Alston interviewed as I was watching Paul Haggis' CRASH, a film that feels as if it's been mouldering in the can since the early 1990s, when films like Joel Schumacher's Falling Down and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon covered similar ground, from the law-and-order right wing and the bleeding heart liberal perspectives respectively. CRASH is about the racism we all carry within us, a fact of which Haggis feels he must remind us in almost every scene, lest we forget without his wise counsel.

In Haggis' Los Angeles, an angry veteran cop (Matt Dillon) pulls over affluent, white collar black people (Thandie Newton and Terrence Howard) for fellating while black; and berate insurance company caseworkers (Loretta Devine) for certainly taking a job that a white person should have. An Idealistic youthful cop (a characteristically sullen Ryan Phillippe) tries to retain his honor and idealism in the mean streets of L.A. A straight-arrow black cop (Don Cheadle) copes with being the Designated Family Shithead to a mother who prefers his petty criminal of a kid brother (Larenz Tate). Feisty black women (the aforementioned Thandie Newton again) berate their men (Terrence Howard again) for allowing the cops to belittle them. An affluent white woman (Sandra Bullock) out with her district attorney husband (Brendan Fraser) clutches her handbag more tightly when passing two young black men (Ludacris and Larenz Tate), only to find herself being carjacked anyway. As a result, she lashes out at the Hispanic locksmith (Michael Peña) who comes to change the locks at her house following the incident. Said Hispanic locksmith is also the whipping boy of choice for a paranoid Iranian shopkeeper, who's the whipping boy of choice for a gun salesman, who presumably sold Michael Douglas' D-Fens the gun he used in Falling Down in 1993.

This kind of "intertwining lives" plot device is usually enough to give one a headache, especially when few of the characters are particularly interesting. The presence of Ryan Phillippe in this film hearkens back to the preposterously arch hey-they're-all-sisters romantic dramedy Playing by Heart, though clearly Haggis is looking more towards directors like Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson for his inspiration here. That CRASH is as compelling as it is, despite how obvious and clunky its plotting is, can be laid at the feet of its unlikely but excellent cast. With the exception of the always-too-histrionic Thandie Newton, and the still-wooden Ryan Phillippe, the cast manages to turn these cardboard cutouts into something resembling characters. The biggest surprise in the cast is Sandra Bullock, who at 41 is trying to branch out now that she's too old to be America's sweetheart. A little bit jowly and as brittle and stiff-necked as the most disillusioned Hollywood rich bitch, she opens the door to entirely new vistas of far more interesting, if less likeable roles. The rest of the cast puts in solid work. Cheadle is as riveting as expected, while Matt Dillon, who is beginning to bear somewhat of a resemblance to Peter Boyle, manages the feat of being both despicable and sympathetic.

CRASH is nothing if not stylish, with its gritty photography by J. Michael Muro and score by Mark Isham underscoring the fact, lest we forget, that this is an Art Film, which is necessary in order to counteract tubthumping, obvious, ponderous lines such as the one the great Don Cheadle is forced to utter in the opening of the film, "In L.A., nobody touches you…I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something." I did not share the love that most critics had for Haggis' script for Million Dollar Baby, and here his tendency to write pronouncements instead of dialogue is even more painfully in evidence. But the biggest problem with this movie is that its derivativeness is at times so overpowering that we never quite engage with this film, but instead find ourselves expecting Michael Douglas with a crewcut entering the scene, or Angelina Jolie appearing to talk about how talking about love is like dancing about architecture, or musing about how Dion Beebe portrayed the alienation and despair of L.A. so much much more effectively in Collateral. Haggis deserves credit for assembling a cast of this size and of this caliber, and directing them to often surprisingly excellent performances, but his film is less than the sum of its parts.

-- Jill Cozzi