Review of 21 Grams

by Roger Baldwin

"They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death. How much can you fit into 21 grams? How much is lost?" I've never heard anyone say that, but this summary statement is the epitaph that ends 21 Grams—the 2nd collaboration between Mexican-born director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto—and it is meant to quantify the soul: the abstract and meaningful dimensions of one's existence, human possibility, the life force. Their innovative and relentlessly solemn drama reflects on this metaphor and contradicts it by tracking three individuals whose souls have been prematurely leeched from their bodies through interconnected tragedies. As with Darren Aronofsky's jarringly hypnotic Requiem for a Dream, its currency is its free fall into despair, but where that exceptional film astonished mostly with technique, this works more persuasively as an intimate, character-driven study, of those beyond the final chapter of possibility. It is a smothering, claustrophobically-focused chronicle of grief, but is often extraordinarily effective inside its bell jar. There are three particularly striking things about the movie: its cubist, fractal experiment in cinematic story-telling, one that gradually assembles a coherent narrative from shards of time-disjointed scenes; the processes of an indifferent destiny bonding disparate lives from improbable and improbably cruel angles; and some of the most powerfully understated acting ever to reach an audience.

21 Grams careens us quite literally into a clattering intersection of three already mangled lives as they skid toward chance, or fate, or God's will, depending on which character you talk to. Sean Penn plays Paul Rivers, a college math professor (something we're given little inkling of except for his collection of corduroy blazers and a short speech midway through which is then left to wither on the vine). His heart has betrayed him (possibly due to the omnipresent shroud of cigarette smoke which envelops him), he's dying and needs a donor. This links him to Cristina Peck (Naomi Watts), an ex-party animal and committed family woman—with at best a tenuous grasp on stability—in the unspeakable throes of family loss. An accident, a mistake, connects both to Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro)—a reformed drunk and felon and self-confessed screwup who has mustered every fiber of his being, with assistance from the Almighty ("Jesus gave me that truck," he insists), to turn his life around. Initially, the three seem to be making a go of it, but this is a story in which no one is given a 2nd chance. Paul's replacement heart also fails him, but in any case it is an open question whether these people have become damaged goods solely because of bad experiences, which the film seems to imply, or at least as much by their own flaws. Given what we're shown, they appear neurochemically challenged, genetically-incapable of long-term joy. If blind furies had not intruded, would they be fundamentally less dysfunctional?

Regardless, 21 Grams ponderously approaches the old subject of Old-Testament style providence, and the characters comment on the forces that have deformed them. Jack, the born-again, repeats the time-worn dilemma of Job. "God knows every time a hair on your head moves," he tells a young punk. If God is omniscient, and omnipotent as people have asked since a fair-minded, can-do creator was first conceived, how can he be so dense to human suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason? Unable to resolve this insoluble conundrum, Jack staggers through the movie with a death wish. Having failed at redemption, he also fails at suicide and then begs for punitive retribution. Paul explains to Cristina in one of the film's few deceptively hopeful scenes, as the two appear to be reconstructing their lives: "There's a hidden number in every fact of life. Numbers are a door to understanding things that are bigger than us." Rationalizing the unlikely coincidences that have introduced him to perhaps the only woman with whom he has ever fallen in love, he tells her, "There are so many things that have to happen for two people to meet." What the characters cannot cope with is the possibility that bad luck brought them together. A divine plan or mathematical necessity, however grim, might validate their misery by giving it some sort of significance and possibly enable them to move on. Random occurrence, a cosmic roll of the dice, cannot offer any meaningful structure, and that alternative cripples them. Jack's wife (Melissa Leo, in one of the innumerably-strong supporting roles) fruitlessly lectures him, "Life goes on, with or without God." Common-sense advice, which the movie categorically ignores.

Infinite sadness can be too much to watch unless it's buffered—by gallows humor, stylistic interventions, ironic subtleties, complementary subplots—it's too off-putting and nihilistic, or we become inured, distancing ourselves by dismissing it as melodramatic overkill. This movie plunges into those waters, it is virtually bankrupt of cathartic chuckles, but is saved by a dazzling, if disorienting method of narration; by the drained, anemic look of Mr. Prieto's photography that welcomes us into its emotional boondocks; and most unforgettably by the riveting, deeply-textured interiors of the performances. Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro master the art of underacting. Penn offers a finer display of his outstanding gifts than he did in Mystic River, it's more effortlessly-nuanced and introspective and is as forceful as anything he's done. He achieves as much with a furtive glance here as with all the strenuous, lachrymose emoting in that movie, admirable though some of that was. Ms. Watts reshapes the tortured melancholy that broke my heart in Mulholland Drive. Hers is the only character that doesn't appeal to a higher power, she is simply hollowed out ("Life doesn't just go on!" she protests). Reducing yourself to a perpetual state of fragile anomie can be a formidable challenge if you want to invite empathy rather than pity, or embarrassment, or boredom. Watts is luminous in her dead zone, there is a steely edginess to her vulnerability, punctuated by eruptions of self-protective rage. Not until Cristina orders a hit does she strike a flat note.

Mr. Del Toro's stubbled, darkly-recessive guilt—after his remarkable turns in The Usual Suspects, Basquiat and Traffic—makes me wonder if there's nothing he cannot do. Del Toro is a queer actor, he explores weird, inventive niches great and small in each new role (here he eats with his fork upside-down), he comes across as something not quite of this earth. He is also an imposing, muscularly-lumpy physical presence, his body's lumbering inertia grinds you down. His opaque, sphinx-like squint shouts volumes of disappointment and self-loathing, few actors have expressed so much with so little activity. The film's most engrossing moments exert themselves in the furious, silent spaces in which the characters' faces release fear, uncertainty or desperation—unbearable and inarticulable—casually, as with a ghastly burn from grasping a smoldering ember. And in the measured, controlled whispers that conceal uncontrollable emotions, that plumb the strata of discontent beneath the small talk. I've seen nothing quite like it, this movie is a crowning triumph of the collective ensemble.

This is Mr. Gonzalez Inarritu's and Mr. Arriaga's contemplative follow up to their stunningly energetic debut, Amores Perros. There they also linked three stories with a car crash, welding the gritty urban realism of Martin Scorsese—to create a Mexico City Mean Streets—to the overlapping sequences of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction into an involving triptych of borrowed originality. Here their instincts have matured, they appear to be flying solo, but they are unsteady, hopefully still learning, hopefully building toward a masterpiece. The snatch-and-grab story-telling in the first 3rd of the movie keeps the audience guessing. It commands your attention, but seems cluttered and bewildering at times. Although that may be intended to frame the arbitrary currents of human connections, it could be more methodically thought out—as with Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's Memento—to elicit a more intuitive, satisfied response. Addressing the monumentality of Fate invariably encourages charges of earnestness, self-importance or overreaching and here it is thick with undistracted determination. The final outcomes can't carry the weight of the spiritual, mathematical or accidental mysticism the film suggests. The individual scenes are more than the sum of their parts, they inevitably set you up for disappointment, the end seems thin, overtaxed. The revenge drama that carries the story to its conclusion is forced, less than credible, a plot-furthering mechanism that is dynamic but out of control. 21 Grams is often so good that it's frustrating, you desperately want the entirety of it to be better. But the talent at every turn is undeniable.

The handful of movies that recently have been trickling in from Mexico, Iran, the Balkans and a few other regions could potentially diversify the US/European Community (and Commonwealth extensions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand), bilateral film world order that we are used to seeing here. (India possibly releases more movies each year than any country, but we wouldn't know that.) Smacking us in the face with a fresh sensibility, shaking up native, familiar genres and routines. Given post-9/11 xenophobia and some of its cloistered flag-centrism, international cinema might function diplomatically in its small way as a Peace Corps, to shave away at barriers of cultural misunderstanding, suspicion and hostility. If American distributors took the risks to acquire them, a bold risk indeed, founded on the assumption that American audiences would actually pay to see them. Market realities work against much of it, even for the art-house crowd. The personal film is alive and well, 2003 was a stellar year for eccentric, indie-spirited pieces if you live in a metropolitan neighborhood or college town. But foreign movies from exotic places—with important exceptions like the Brazilian City of God—barely dented our consciousness. Which is unfortunate, we're far from it's a small world after all.

Read about 21 Grams in the Internet Movie Database

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