21 GRAMS

by Gordon

Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Released: 2003

Rating: R [language, sexuality, some violence and drug use]

Runtime: 124 min.

Main Cast: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Rotten Tomatoes: 81%                    IMDB: 7.9/10

 

   I thought 21 Grams was going to be a movie about drugs, cocaine probably. I was dead wrong. It includes drugs, yes, but is actually one of those big something-shitty-happened-that-brings-together-a-bunch-of-shitty-lives stories, kind of like Crash, only without nearly as much hope, if any. And that, I’d argue, was a big downfall.

   Though not nearly as big as the non-linear structure that director Alejandro González Iñárritu decided to present the story in. Non-linear certainly has its place, and always adds interest, but is a cheap trick if simply employed to draw attention, when a good story in itself should suffice for that purpose. The jumbled mix of discordant scenes, especially in the beginning, did more to confuse and annoy me than add interest, though I suppose it still did.

   When, half an hour in, Del Toro’s character Jack plainly proclaims to his wife that he’d run over a man and his two daughters (a starter action that sets much of the remaining events into play), I utterly embraced the first inkling of some semblance of a story. The now widowed Cristina (Naomi Watts) is left grieving for the rest of the film, though this subsides somewhat when she meets Paul Rivers (Penn), a man who continues to live because of the heart transplant given to him using the organ of Cristina’s deceased husband (a tidbit he understandably chooses to wait to reveal to her).

   Look, I enjoy the artful expression of bitter, reality-driven sad lives riddled with human flaws, problems and complaints, I really do, but when that scenario is devoid of any hope, the emotional stakes we hold for the characters dies off dramatically, and in this story, that’s exactly the case. No character ever seems close to content (except maybe in rare and short-lived flashbacks), and this doesn’t change, no matter their steps taken to escape their discontentment. No more rooting for positive outcomes. Simply watching these players crash and burn…slowly.

   The frustrating thing is that this story could easily stand alone, chronologically told, as enthralling. Therefore, the director’s choice of directing style comes down to that exactly: stylistic. While Iñárritu does prove he’s capable of some top-notch filmmaking, he simply has to better decide the “when” and “why” behind his directorial choices.

   Whereas an actor’s challenge is to convincingly convey their character’s changes from different state to different state over the course of some constructed timeline, non-linear storytelling shows you these different states with no explanation for the change. All the actor has to do is “be different” and they succeed, while our interest becomes less involved with what’s actually transpiring and more with the voids of unseen transitions. For 21 Grams, as Rob Gonsalves of eFilmCritic.com put it, “The structure simply doesn’t let any of the characters build an arc of growth or despair.” And on top of all that, it carries with it an air of “smart”, simply for confidently charging on while the viewer for the most part remains out of the loop and guessing. For me this was a joyless exercise.

   But while it’s his ability to pull together an overall story that I question, the director still has a knack for seeing and presenting the individual stories of each character and how these interact with one another, as was also the case in his next film, Babel. Although this, too, should not be met without some healthy criticism, perhaps directed at the writer. Sometimes writers introduce secondary stories to give us something else to think over if we’re not taken by the central plot. But if these secondary stories don’t aid or at least come into play with the driving theme, they merely detract from that driving theme’s significance. For this movie, there will no doubt exist differing perspectives on the matter.

   Overall it was a brilliantly acted movie (Del Toro in particular). Sometimes, however, the more important decider is not the story itself, but how well you can tell it.