Despite the implications of the title, 21 Grams is not a film about drugs or drug-dealing. Instead, it is a film about loss, so complex and intricate that it is difficult to convey the basic narrative points without giving away everything. As in his previous movie, Amores Perros, director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and his scriptwriter, Guillermo Arriaga, posit three separate narrative strands with a unifying moment of crisis and, like Amores Perros, this involves a motorcar accident.
Yet Iñárritu fragments the entire narrative progression with a non-linear presentation: the scenes hop between the past and present, between supposition and actuality. By the film’s end, some cards have not been dealt at all, and others may well be jokers. Iñárritu allows viewers to edit together their own version or understanding of the narrative. This seemed to confuse American audiences or proved to be too challenging, but we’re a brighter lot here, aren’t we? The slow accretion of information is thrilling and demanding, and it helps to disguise a soap-opera shrillness of tone that attends the story, once it is laid bare.
Suffice it to say that Sean Penn plays a college mathematics professor awaiting a heart transplant, Naomi Watts is a grieving widow who has lost both her husband and children, and Benicio del Toro is a jailbird, unable to keep his innate aggression and potential for violence under complete control, despite his embrace of religion. The unexpected and unorthodox religiosity of this film may further disturb some viewers; I found some difficulty in discerning just where Iñárritu makes his stand.
But 21 Grams is engrossing and cathartic, hypnotic in its intensity and superbly observed. It is also blessed with a few remarkable performances and many good ones. Penn eschews his usual hard-edged, extreme and (dare I say) obvious performance in favour of an enigmatic subtlety that is astonishing, especially when compared with his turn in Mystic River. Watts has more “show and tell” to play with — drug addiction is perversely photogenic — but hers is the performance that Charlize Theron must beat if she is to take home the Academy Award. Del Toro, despite a heavy-handed make-up job, manages that most difficult of cinematic tricks: the conveyance of thought and the progression of half-formed subconscious ideas. Also notable is Melissa Leo as the ex-con’s wife, exhausted by the realisation that she preferred the person he was before his reformation.
Iñárritu overplays his hand on occasion: the bleached, gunmetal cast that affects each scene is enervating, and he takes just a little too long to feed us the information we need, so the film seems padded by some 15 minutes or so. The questions he raises, however, are profound and lingering. The key intersection here is not where the pivotal accident occurred, but the leaps of faith, doubt or self-destruction between redemption and pre-ordained fate. Seldom have I seen grief so convincingly portrayed.
Does this mean that 21 Grams is unremittingly bleak and uncompromising? Iñárritu’s greatest strength is the intellectual puzzle he sets the audience and it repels any possibility of sentimentality or theatrical emotionality. He takes his trump card from the Greek dramatists — the deaths occur off screen. I said this film was about loss — it’s also about the aftermath and the consequences.
Alan Swerdlow is the SAfm arts and entertainment specialist. He discusses movies on Saturdays, satirically in Miss This Movie (9.05am) and seriously in Art of the Matter (11am). Shaun de Waal returns next week