21 Grams
"21 Grams" is a capital-M movie, and the most flagrant kind: Heavy emotion, heavy style, and lite philosophy converge and choke us with meaning. The humanist aspirations and attention-grabbing, time-altering structure of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez IÄnarritu and his writer, Guillermo Arriaga, can't make up for the fact that their movie is sprayed with an aerosol of grandeur to cover up the odor of pulp.
``21 Grams'' has been assembled, out of sequence, in a manner of high post-traumatic disorientation. The story begins in the middle - a man sits in bed with a sleeping woman - and never finds a suitable beginning or end, only a desert of big, weighty themes. The man is named Paul (Sean Penn). He's a math professor, and in a matter of minutes we get an array of scenes of him in good health, in violent confusion, and in sickness, lying in a hospital with tubes going into him. Major Symbol Alert: Paul awaits a heart transplant.
The woman in that bed, meanwhile, is Cristina (Naomi Watts). Her husband and daughters have been killed in a hit-and-run accident, and the dead man's heart has been installed in Paul's chest. Promptly, we move somewhere else in time and place to Jack (Benicio Del Toro), a father, a husband, and recidivist felon, who has discovered in Christ a medicine for his malfeasance. Jack is also the man who pulls away after speeding into Cristina's middle-class family. He turns himself in, believing that this is all Jesus' will.
The film moves forward and back, showing us how Paul surreptitiously stalks the bereaved and drug-addled Cristina, the love they fall into, and the revenge plot she proposes to make Jack pay for his sins. ``21 Grams'' wastes no time establishing that these three will meet in a seedy motel room where blood will be spilled, and we wonder how the movie will top the fact that its climax arrives in the first 15 minutes.
Gonzalez and Arriaga made the more rigorous ``Amores Perros,'' a hot-blooded look at the down and out in Mexico City. ``21 Grams'' is another movie about decaying people, about revenge and redemption and the holy coincidences that fall in the space between.
But where ``Amores Perros'' seduces you into believing we're all just marionettes being jerked by a set of cosmic strings, ``21 Grams'' uses shallow, loaded images (a shot of a devil doll that comes just before Cristina takes the call about her family, photos stuffed in a Sam Shepard novel) to make the same point. It's troubling when you can't see the cosmos for the screenwriting. When a coked-up Cristina says to Paul about Jack, ``We have to kill him,'' the characters go from plangent freethinkers to emblematic cogs in a trumped-up B-movie.
Despite this, the acting is something to see. After Penn's operatic, wildly overpraised bombast in ``Mystic River,'' his relative smallness here is a mercy. As for Watts, when she's not crying and screaming, she screams and cries. It's the sort of ferocious stuff that makes Oscar voting easy for some people. (See Halle Berry in ``Monster's Ball.'') Still, the role is a couple of breakdowns in search of a character.
Del Toro does the truly eloquent work here, making rage, pathos, passiveness, and remorse more than a series of Oscar clips. (Jack is the major character who isn't overshadowed by the movie's formal restlessness.) Del Toro is exciting for the opposite reason Penn is: He undercooks his men so they seem life-size. Charlotte Gainsbourg also elicits sympathy as Paul's exasperated English wife; and Melissa Leo is good as Jack's less glamorous, even more long-suffering old lady.
``21 Grams'' is long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground. Not only can you feel what's going to happen, it's disappointing when Gonzalez actually starts cheaply toying with us. Would-be tragic events seem inconsequential. The movie just can't keep still long enough to earn our anxiety. And its actions seem utterly foregone. Of course, the widow of the man whose heart beats in Penn's body looks like Naomi Watts. Fine as she is, that's not exactly inspired casting. There's no risk in their liaison.
Gonzalez and Arriaga seem to think that their movie is powerful enough for questions of motive, genre, and casting to fall beside the point. That the very idea of pain - be it physical, emotional, or spiritual - should be enough to knock us out, regardless of how fleetingly the story of that pain is pulled together. That's hubris at its most irrational.
The title apparently refers to the amount of mass our bodies supposedly lose at the moment of death. The movie wraps up with Penn reprising the ponderous narration he uses to open the movie: ``How much does love weigh? How much does guilt weigh? How much does life weigh?'' I'm afraid that were I to ask the filmmakers how much they think their movie weighs, they'd look me square in the face and say, ``21 tons.''
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