Modern American race relations get simplified to a laughable degree in 'Crash,' a multiple-character story set in Los Angeles and covering two days in the lives of several Angelinos of various ethnic and class backgrounds. Each character encounters hostility from someone of another group, and, in turn, each character gets to express some personal prejudice and hostility toward some other group. Writer-director Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for 'Million Dollar Baby') spins this vicious circle hoping to turn these ordinary social vices into meaningful events, but pumping up the hostility only makes 'Crash' feel so contrived that its most dramatic moments become unintentionally funny.

Haggis uses a cast of mixed ethnicity. The stars range from producer Sandra Bullock to Don Cheadle, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard, Brendan Fraser, Jennifer Esposito, Nona Gaye, Matt Dillon and Ryan Phillippe. Black social interactions are, of course, the basic template for U.S. race problems, so the major stories focus on the black characters, Haggis illustrating the film's title in the climactic metaphor of a black woman (Loretta Devine) getting into a fender-bender with an Asian woman. This convenient L.A. happening is not as rich a metaphor as the roadside encounter in the 1995 Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard film 'Grand Canyon,' where filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan responded to the catastrophe of the Rodney King trial by measuring the gulf between L.A.'s blacks and whites, its rich and its poor. Haggis is simply after noise and violence -- and praise for "honesty."

'Crash' is a soap opera that misrepresents the complexities that lie behind Americans' public behavior. Ignoring any recognizably true social event, Haggis makes up his crises from his own cynical imagination. His main characters are Graham (Cheadle), a police detective and Cameron (Howard), a TV director, roles representing Haggis' own position as a monitor of social activity and a creator of media content. Ironically, although both positions are held in the film by good black actors known for their conscientious fidelity to truth, their characters only represent Haggis' paranoid white fantasies, as opposed to his empathy. Graham and Cameron personify a white liberal's sense of political futility and male weakness. They are "black" in appearance only because the routines they go through are stereotypical and without insight.

Two instances: It's disturbing when Cameron is forced to watch his wife (Newton) get molested by Dillon's racist white cop and it's depressing to see Graham fail at his jobs as both a policeman and a family man. By superficially dramatizing African American stress, Haggis proves his supposed political sympathies are trite. Cameron's irrational wife behaves indignantly after her assault; but an educated, upper middle class woman with social position would know that she had recourse to legal action. Here, Haggis simply has her berate her ineffectual husband, Newton miscast in a role of abuse and hysteria that better suits Halle Berry.

Graham's conflict is equally absurd. He's a good cop whose middle-aged mother (played by the veteran Beverly Todd) is a heroin addict who favors her thuggish son, played by 'Menace II Society's' Larenz Tate. Alienated from the ghetto (except to patrol it), Graham has an affair with his Latina colleague (Esposito) merely to facilitate Haggis' multi-culti network. To point out Graham's distance from his roots, his mother speaks in extreme Ebonics. ("Did U fine yo bruva?") It's sad to see Todd, once Sidney Poitier's beautiful, intelligent love interest in the 60s, so degraded here. Todd enacts a ghetto clich‚ no different than the one Cameron objects to at his TV studio.

Like Michael Douglas' 1993 'Falling Down,' 'Crash' is a white liberal's demoralized, masochistic vision of how bad things can get. Its absurd contrivances include Dillon saving Newton's life less than 24 hours after inappropriately manhandling her. Not even Ludacris, with his powerful comic presence, can make sense of his role as a carjacker who hates hip-hop. ("It's the music of the oppressor. The white man says let's give the niggas music by mumbling idiots.") In a showdown between Ludacris and Howard, Howard hands Ludacris back his gun, then advises, "You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself." Only Howard's liquid eyes and emotional directness makes this sentimental moment bearable.

'Crash' is an aggravating imitation of such revelatory films as Robert Altman's 'Short Cuts' and Charles Burnett's 'The Glass Shield,' both of which examined L.A.'s race tension without Haggis' habit of making gutless and implausible dramatic teases. Only Sandra Bullock has a sensible role as a rich white woman who finds herself cut off from human compassion. This is the single characterization without ugly, morbid showing off, the one role that gets contemporary tensions and prejudices right. No surprise it's a white character, something Haggis believably understands without a stretch.

Break It Down: A soap opera about racial tension that is false to reality.