Release Date: November 21, 2003
Starring: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melissa Leo, Danny Huston
Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Written by: Guillermo Arriaga
Distributed by: Focus Features
MPAA Rating: R (language, sexuality, some violence, drug use)
In 1907, The New York Times reported on the exploits of a Duncan MacDougall, a physician who performed a series of experiments on terminally ill patients designed to measure the weight of their bodies immediately before and after death. His experiments showed -- albeit with a fairly substantial margin of error -- that dead bodies lose approximately three-fourths of an ounce of weight, or about 21 grams, at the time of death, which MacDougall concluded was the departure of the human soul.
21 Grams, the sophomore feature from Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated Amores perros, has nothing to do with MacDougall's experiments, but it does subscribe to the doctor's belief that the human soul is a tangible commodity -- just one of the many pretentious touches to this flawed but well-acted picture.
It is a story of three characters from different walks of life drawn together by a series of tragic events, told out of chronological order as Iñárritu also did in Amores perros. One is Cristina (Naomi Watts), a recovering drug addict and widow who is drawn into an affair with the second, Paul (Sean Penn), a melancholy math teacher suffering from a terminal heart disease. Meanwhile, Paul's wife Mary (Charlotte Gainsburg) is desperately trying to get pregnant with his child before he dies, for reasons that he cannot understand. And the third is Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro), a born-again ex-con whose literal, almost mindless devotion to his newfound Christian values frightens his wife Marianne (Melissa Leo) and his two young children.
The movie stars three actors who've shown us brilliance in the past, and all of whom aim to and do reach those same heights in 21 Grams: Watts, who was widely praised in Mulholland Dr., gives another tortured, twisted, and admirable performance as Cristina; Penn, previously praised in Mystic River, plays the morose Paul with a mix of self-resignation and ironclad strength; and Del Toro, who was the standout in Traffic, is a force of emotion packed so densely into his hulking frame that he makes a black hole look like whipped cream.
These performances are the only thing to latch onto in the film, which is told out of order because it's become the contemporary director's weapon of choice when the intent is to make an elusively emphatic melodrama. This is Iñárritu's first English-language feature, and as written by fellow Mexican Guillermo Arriaga, it starts out as a confusing mess of scenes that only later mold themselves into recognizable form. But it's purely a filmmaker's contrivance, as if to arbitrarily suggest the sporadic, almost haphazard nature of human action in the wake of substantial grief -- not a form of artistic or narrative expression.
The same could be said of the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, which, like Iñárritu's direction, wavers between true art and a would-be artist's self-conscious posing. He shoots the entire film in a bleached-out, grainy film stock that is supposed to imply that the events taking place in the story have a raw, gritty quality. They do, but Iñárritu's ideal target audience, an educated viewership that will appreciate an abstract tale of death and human destruction, does not need to be spoon-fed this.
On the other hand, there are some striking images to be had with this type of cinematography, and it's wonderful to see a director and crew that appreciate this. When used correctly, it is my favorite type of visual aesthetic, and there's a great image near the beginning of the movie that illustrates why: Iñárritu and Prieto shoot the silhouette of a building near dusk, and the building looks almost entirely black against the pink-purple-blue of the sky. Suddenly a flock of birds takes to the sky, and in this washed-out vision they look like a cloud of black insects, enough to blot out the sun.
The cinematography also helps with the atmosphere of the setting, which is middle America in the bleak of winter. It feels about as cold as the story, which has almost no sense of redemption whatsoever: Paul is constantly fending off his nagging wife, who is as subtly selfish as they come, and later learns that the heart he was given in a transplant will soon give out. Cristina has lost her husband and has returned once again to drugs (Watts captures this exquisitely, with an assist from the production's makeup artist, Gloria Belz, who has done wonders to turn Watts's high-cheeked radiance into a flat, sallow countenance). And Jack, who is a dead ringer for an ex-con who won't be out of prison long, feels constantly let down by his faith in Jesus when things don't go his way.
In a way, this is kind of like a modern-day, American version of Les Miserables, although none of the characters have any success reinventing themselves. Nor does Iñárritu reinvent many of the same themes that he previously explored in Amores perros. Rather, this is just a showy, arrogant attempt by a rookie director to break into the Hollywood main rescued by a trio of great performances.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)