In this 2004 drama from Paul Haggis the
viewer gets a rare taste of racial and social tensions that go on in our daily
lives by allowing us to live these tensions through the actions of Sandra
Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, William Fichtner, Brendan
Fraser, Terrence Howard, Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe,
Larenz Tate, and Michael Pena. The
director, Paul Haggis, sets his movie in the city of Los Angeles that is full
of different cultures, and where racial profiling, and first impressions of the
people around the streets can lead to miscommunications both verbal and
nonverbal.
Interpersonal
conflict
The one interpersonal conflict that I felt
after watching this movie that was not handled effectively was the family
relationship between Detective Graham Walters (Don Cheadle) and his junkie
mother, to whom he promises to find his missing brother Peter (Larenz Tate)
that is currently in trouble with the law for carjacking Rick, (Brendan Fraser)
the local district attorney and his wife Jean’s (Sandra Bullock) SUV at gun
point after having dinner together. In
our reading on primary relationships (Chapter 8 section 4) we learned that”
family is a unified and interconnected system, and change in on part of the
system creates changes or reactions in other parts of the system.” (Sole, K.
2011) The pattern in which the relationship
between Detective Walters and his mother changed when the youngest son started
down the path of crime and the mother did not get the proper help she needed to
get clean from the drugs she was/is on.
The relationship between these family members is strained and needs to
be handled through professional help by means of drug rehab and telling the
truth that Reid has given up hope in finding his lost brother for his mother,
even though she believes he can be helped and still cares for her. In the closing scenes Reid does find his
brother Peter, just not the way he had hoped to. The camera pans from the tennis shoe found
lying by the side of the road to the face of a now dead Peter shot by Officer
Tom Hansen (Ryan Philippe) after offering Peter a ride and a nonverbal
miscommunication is done, with a simple act of pulling the Saint Christopher
statue out his pocket to show that even though the two Hansen and Peter come
from different cultures they have the same belief in the statue that is on the
dashboard.
