21 Grams

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams is an indubitably powerful film in both form/style and content, even if I am not entirely sure how much substance there is behind its marvelous sleight-of-hand. Plus, I have to give it points for being the most relentlessly downbeat film to be given a major Hollywood release since at least Magnolia.
The look of the film is quite impressive. It’s shot mostly in closeups or near-closeups with a restless, unable-to-be-still, handheld camera, in grungy and grotty locations, in various varieties of ugly lighting and color schemes. The chronology is thoroughly scrambled, with the scenes arranged in what’s almost a jigsaw puzzle of fragments. And it only becomes clear a good way into the film how the three major characters are related: Jack (Benicio Del Toro), an ex-con who has become a Christian, and who is seriously trying to reform, but who kills a man and his two daughters in a hit-and-run; Cristina (Naomi Watts), the bereft wife and mother as a result of the hit and run; and Paul (Sean Penn), who receives the dead man’s heart in a transplant. The way the lives of these three come together might seem forced if the film unfolded in chronological order; but the tangled temporality is entirely appropriate to, and expressive of, the tangled nature of their relationships. The acting, of course, is great (I prefer Del Toro here to his Oscar-winning performance in Traffic; although Watts is excellent, she doesn’t equal – and couldn’t, given the nature of the part – her amazing performance in Mulholland Drive).
I can’t help feeling, in retrospect, that the film comes off a bit strained and pretentious: by which I mean that what it delivers is not quite up to the measure of its ambitions, which are vast. But moment by moment, 21 Grams is powerful and compelling, and – though I didn’t love it as much as I did Lost in Translation – I still have to say that few English-language films released this year come anywhere near it.