Fragments

The anxiety is deafening in this flimsy symphony of shattered lives, which—like that confounding Oscar winner Crash—confuses entropy for empathy. When a gunman opens fire in a diner, several witnesses begin their slow declines. A waitress (Beckinsale) lashes out for attention by abusing her infant; a cancer sufferer (Whitaker) takes his luck to the casino; a doctor (Pearce) obsesses over drugs for his migraine-suffering wife. Some caricatures—like Whitaker’s dying gambler—are peculiar enough to warrant our scrutiny. But why expect any depth from a one-note tapestry with the attention span of a daytime soap—and the same intellectual rigor?