All that and car crashes, too

Race isn’t something we talk about easily, much less joke. Sex, yes. In all forms. The documentary film “The Aristocrats” is a good example. In telling a joke that Lenny Bruce would find obscene, the various comics – from George Carlin to Sarah Silverman , Bob Saget to Rita Rudner – have no problem making jokes involving feces, semen, blood, sodomy, pederasty and even incest. Yet at the end of the film, when the filmmaker Paul Provenza touches on race, the joking doesn’t go very far.

Race is the basis of the film “Crash,” which boasts an all-star Hollywood cast that includes Don Cheadle , Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito , Terrence Dashon Howard, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe and Larenz Tate. Telling a story that blends several subplots, with characters cross-weaving from one plotline to the next, “Crash” deals with the pressures and pains of the isolated life lived by the residents of Los Angeles. What it says, basically, is that the lack of connection causes us to, on occasion, crash into each other just to make some sort of contact.

Here at the end of May, just five months into 2005, it’s safe to already put “Crash” at the top of the list of the year’s best films. What Paul Haggis has created is, quite simply, a work of art of the most affecting sort: superbly acted and with something important to say.

And just imagine. It has even some cool car crashes.