Tired Types Flip Upside Down in This ‘Crash’

New Yorker critic David Denby raved. The New York Post called it “a thoughtful road trip well worth taking.”

Thanks, guys, but it’s my town you’re talking about.

The subject is the movie “Crash,” which depicts a seething, carved-up Los Angeles in which racial hostility blows as hot as a wicked Santa Ana wind.

Why is it that out-of-towners can’t resist the chance to cheer the long-awaited Los Angeles apocalypse?

My curiosity piqued, I went to see “Crash” at the ArcLight in Hollywood, but I didn’t go alone. I took two members of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.

The commission, as the website describes it, is “dedicated to promoting positive race and human relations in an increasingly complex and multicultural county.” My guests were civil rights attorneys Thomas Saenz, a Mexican American, and Kathay Feng, an Asian American.

We didn’t arrive early enough to buy popcorn, but “Crash” isn’t that kind of movie. It’s a 90-minute lecture from director Paul Haggis on what alienated monsters we are, despite the goodness and commonality trapped inside. So the instinct is to reach for a stiff drink or a tranquilizer rather than a tub of popcorn.

In the very first scene, we get a car crash that erupts into a shouting match. In one vehicle is an Asian woman, who blames the accident on the occupants of the other vehicle -- two Los Angeles Police Department detectives.

The Asian woman says something about applying the “blakes” instead of the “brakes.”

I kind of peeked over to see if Kathay Feng was flinching, but I couldn’t tell in the dark. Oh, well, we’d have plenty of time to share notes after the movie.

One of the detectives, a Latina, mocks the Asian woman’s language, then goes home for a roll with the black detective, who insults her with a crack about Latinos parking their cars on the lawn.

To this point, though, the most offensive line isn’t a slur -- at least not to a human. It’s the black detective’s first thoughts after the car crash. He says that in “real cities” there’s more human contact than there is in Los Angeles.

“I think we miss that sense of touch so much,” he says, speaking metaphorically, “we crash into each other just to feel something.”

Did I say tranquilizer?

It’s the stiff drink I need, after all.

At the risk of committing my own generalization, I’m not sure there are many cops who, moments after being plowed into by another driver, would offer up a quiet meditation on the emptiness of the human heart.

And as for the observation that people in L.A. get around by car, I think I already heard that somewhere.

But “Crash,” to be fair, does pull off a neat trick. The dialogue is clean, if abrasive, and many of the performances are sharp, so it actually looks like a smart movie tackling a tough subject.

As it clumsily develops, however, you realize you’re watching a puppet show.

A racist white cop molests a black woman during a bogus traffic stop, but later saves her from a burning car. A Latino locksmith who looks like a gangbanger turns out to be father of the year. Two black carjackers drag a “Chinaman” down the street on the undercarriage of their stolen car, but turn out to be witty philosophers with hearts of gold.

The D.A.’s wife, an insufferable witch, insults the ethnic help until she tumbles down the stairs and realizes her only friend in the world is the Latina maid. A crazed Iranian tries to kill the Latino locksmith, whose cute little daughter steps into the line of fire, but the little girl survives because the Iranian unwittingly bought blanks from a racist gun shop owner.

This near-miss, naturally, is a transformative moment for the nut-ball Iranian. And I almost forgot to mention that the little girl was wearing an imaginary protective cape given to her by the father of the year.

Exhausted?

I was. And I haven’t even mentioned the scene in which a saintly white cop, off duty, picks up one of the black carjackers, who is hitchhiking in the San Fernando Valley. The carjacker’s a hockey fan, of course, turning another stereotype on its head, and he’s just been out for some ice-skating between car thefts.

But the good cop panics when the kid reaches into his pocket for his St. Christopher statue -- I swear every word of this is true -- thinking the kid is going for a gun. The good cop puts a bullet through the kid’s chest and then hides the body, and the poor lad becomes the first black man ever to die for the love of hockey.

On our way out of the theater, Saenz patted Feng on the back and told her that his people made out better than hers.

True enough, Feng agreed. The Asian characters were all either racists or criminals, except for the slaves set free by one of the black carjackers (irony, Hollywood-style).

In a city that’s half Latino, Saenz said, the only two Latino characters in the movie are cardboard. There’s the loyal maid “and the noble savage” -- the misunderstood Latino with baggy pants, neck tattoos and a gentle soul.

Feng guessed the movie was interested in saying bad people can have goodness in them, even if that’s not exactly a revelation. And she gave the movie credit for being provocative.

“But what does it provoke you to think about?” she asked, unsure of the answer.

You can’t think much of anything, Saenz said, because with only a couple of exceptions in the movie, there’s no social and historic context for the characters’ suspicion and hatred.

“It’s just images thrown onto a flat screen, with no depth,” he said, even when stereotypes are exploded and hope rises in the dust of the blast.

After seeing the movie, I read where director Haggis told LA Weekly that “Crash” -- inspired by his own experience as a carjacking victim in Los Angeles -- is not about race.

“It’s about strangers, others. About how we love to divide ourselves.... We will always manufacture differences.” In another interview, Haggis said we became terrified of one another after Sept. 11, 2001, further isolating ourselves from one another.

Some of this may be true, but if there’s anything new in it, “Crash” doesn’t tell us what it might be.

To the extent that the movie is about Los Angeles, yeah, we’re sealed off from one another, existing behind gates and car windows. But we do sometimes hook up -- at Griffith Park, the beach, the Third Street Promenade, Dodger Stadium, Ralphs, and at movie theaters.

In my New York apartment building, seldom did a word pass between me and my neighbors as we rode the elevator shoulder to shoulder.

Yes, L.A.’s got bigots. Yes, it’s a flawed experiment in modern living. Yes, it’s divided by race and ethnicity, as is the rest of the world, and there’s always a rumbling of trouble off in the distance.

But on most days, it works. Would millions of us have come here, from every corner of the world, if it didn’t?

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com.