'Crash' is driving in circles on the road of despair

After paying his dues for many years as a television writer-producer, Paul Haggis ("EZ Streets," "Walker, Texas Ranger") made a very successful jump to feature films last year with his Oscar-nominated script for Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby."

MOVIE REVIEW

CRASH

DIRECTOR: Paul Haggis

CAST: Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Thandie Newton,

Matt Dillon, William Fichtner

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes

RATING: R for language, sexual content and some violence

GRADE: B-

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Now he seems to be on the fast track toward becoming an A-list movie director. With "Baby" barely out of the multiplexes, he's already up to bat with his first effort in that department: "Crash," a star-studded drama which he also co-wrote and co-produced.

And, in many ways, it's a skillful piece of filmmaking and an impressive debut, though it's so relentlessly bleak and downbeat for most of its running time that it can't recover when it tries to go soft in its third act, and it's difficult to imagine it becoming much of a hit.

Set during the Christmas season, the movie flows in and out of a number of interconnected stories, in the style of "Love Actually," although the opposite in mood and content. Instead of finding that "love is all around," Haggis finds the exact opposite.

For instance, there's the shallow young L.A. district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his strident trophy wife (Sandra Bullock) whose paranoid fear of young black men becomes palpable when their SUV is carjacked at gunpoint one night on Rodeo Drive.

Then there are two thieves themselves (Larenz Tate and Chris Bridges), who, bantering like a pair of comic Tarantino thugs, manage to run down an elderly Korean businessman as they flee the scene of the crime in the stolen SUV.

There's also a harrowingly bigoted L.A. cop (Matt Dillon) who pulls over a similar SUV and gleefully humiliates its young black television director driver (Terence Howard) and sexually abuses his wife (Thandie Newton).

And there's plenty of other cops as well, most of them jaded or insensitive or downright corrupt, including Don Cheadle as a world-weary detective, Ryan Phillippe as a rookie in the process of losing his soul, and William Fichtner as a diabolical internal affairs smoothie.

As Haggis cuts between these stories and adds a homicidally bigoted Iranian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub), it gradually becomes clear that, except a few Hispanic innocents, everyone in the movie is, to a greater or lesser degree, a racist.

It's an apocalyptic vision, and a fairly riveting one at that. The performances (especially Howard and a horrifically convincing Dillon) are excellent, some of the scenes are gruesomely powerful, and Haggis displays an original eye and flair for visual storytelling.

But he so overstates his case for post-9/11 America's universal racism and state of disgrace that he can't retreat from it. He tries to mellow out toward the end, and move several of his more obnoxious characters toward redemption.

He even throws in a heavenly miracle of sorts to show that he's got some Capraesque magic in his directing soul. Yet somehow it doesn't play: the last-minute shaft of light is very forced and "Crash" can't rise from the ashes of its pessimism.