Before scripting Million Dollar Baby, Paul Haggis was best known for his gritty work in television, and though shows like EZ Streets found critical acclaim, it was still somewhat of a surprise to see a TV writer make such a smooth transition into feature filmmaking. Even the best television shows are marred by the necessity to get things said and done at the expense of nuance; to jam as much story into every episode as possible. Million Dollar Baby, on the other hand, had indelible moments of narrative breathing­­especially through the use of voiceover--­­where Haggis provided ample room for Clint Eastwood to create something that was both brutal and poetic. Haggis was heralded as one of the best new feature writers in town, and his directorial debut, Crash, comes on the heels of Million Dollar Baby’s success. Who could blame the studio head that gave the okay? Unfortunately, Haggis hasn’t written and directed a feature so much as gone back to his old self and slapped together a very long TV episode, and a preposterous one at that.

Though ostensibly an examination of race and class conflict in Los Angeles, Crash feels more like a politically correct act of penance stemming from Haggis’s liberal white guilt, which in itself is a form of moral grandstanding. The Caucasian characters are predictably nasty and seemingly unworthy of redemption, whereas the black and Latino characters are treated like misunderstood angels. If Haggis were at all interested in being tough-minded about real conditions in L.A., then he should’ve perhaps handled his characterizations more democratically or better yet, not have made race such a transparently Big Deal. (L.A. has one of the largest Asian populations in the States and that group is practically ignored.) Moreover, nearly every interaction is staged as an interrogation between characters so obsessed with skin color that the film loses whatever claims to authenticity it attempts to establish through its use of real locations and naturalistic performances. This sort of speechifying pedantry is generally excusable in television because the viewer needs to get in and out of a story within the allotted time frame, and in order to do so, some plausibility has to be sacrificed. Here, Haggis’s lack of commitment to the reality of Los Angeles turns Crash into an unintentionally comic ensemble piece not unlike daytime soaps.

Crash follows the lives of about a dozen Angelenos over the course of two days; most of whom are connected to one another through coincidence rather than the more plausible narrative device some would call grace. The cops, thieves, store owners, and lovers that populate Haggis’s cityscape go about their daily lives with one thing on their minds: telling the audience exactly how they feel about racial intolerance and how it affects who they are. It’s patronizing filmmaking. Given that they serve as mere mouthpieces, how are we supposed to care for these characters if they have so few human attributes? The opening voiceover, where Don Cheadle’s cop character ruminates on the isolation endemic to Los Angeles, obviously written for the viewer‘s edification, perhaps demands to be at least considered, but instead of flesh and blood, we’re given opinions about the state of affairs which in the end aren’t any more original or insightful than those found in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times. Even when these ideas are expressed through action­­the worst involves a white male cop sexually violating an innocent black woman in front of her powerless black husband--­­it’s still flaccid storytelling, much like what a high-school term paper on intolerance would look like if acted out. Unsurprisingly, the best scenes in the film are the deliberately awkward, comic ones where characters and images have a chance to breathe and Haggis has space to sculpt some authentic human interactions. They succeed because, though race is still at issue, it’s not turned into the main attraction.