Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/21 Grams

Movie Guru Rating:

Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Heavy Duty

21 Grams carries the weight of the world

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Naomi Watts is not quite beautiful. There's a ceramic hardness in her porcelain cheeks and the oddly squared dimples of her lower lip ("corners of the mouth" isn't a figure of speech with her). It's an elusive quality—when she smiles, it almost disappears—and it makes you understand why first David Lynch and now Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu sought her out to embody their respective visions of woman-at-the-abyss.

She is a frighteningly good actress—at her most piercing, she can make your bones ache. She is easily the best reason to see 21 Grams, which is itself more striking than attractive. Her performance is all the more remarkable because it withstands the company of veteran bone-achers Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. And of Mexican hotshot Inarritu, who sticks the movie's relatively straightforward plot in a Cuisinart and sprays the jumbled chronology across the screen in a jagged mosaic, guaranteeing at least a half-hour of total confusion at the beginning as you try to figure out the sequence of events and connections between the various characters.

This is Inarritu's second film, after the huzzahed Amores Perros, and there are several obvious things to say about his electing to make an American movie in English with Hollywood stars. If Amores Perros was a razzle-dazzle calling card, this is the solid resume-building follow-up. Less brutal and bloody, more brooding and moral, it is high-minded to a fault. The Big Questions about life, death, love and hate are all present and accounted for, and by the time the movie starts pulling its punches, you're thankful for the let-up. Although it ultimately reaches for redemption, the overall experience of 21 Grams is draining. Everyone involved is working very hard, and the effort carries over to the viewer.

As in Amores Perros, the story revolves around a tragic event that brings together three separate strands. Here, the strands are Paul (Penn), a math professor dying of heart disease and desperate for a transplant; Jack (Del Toro), a born-again ex-con trying to do good by his wife and kids and the lord; and Cristina (Watts), an affluent housewife and recovering cocaine addict with a charming husband and two beautiful daughters. All have difficult pasts; before he got sick, Paul was a serial philanderer who chased off his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg), although she has now returned to care for him and—she hopes—become pregnant by him before he dies.

Because of Inarritu's kaleidoscopic editing, we see all three characters at different points in their lives, and it's not immediately clear which are flashbacks and which are flash-forwards. 21 Grams is hardly the first movie in recent years to mess around with narrative structure, but Inarritu is aiming for more than gimmickry or suspense. The movie circles its key plot points like accident scenes that it can't quite bear to look at. It's an effective device, because by the time the bad things happen, we've already seen their devastating consequences. (The triggering event that brings the three together actually happens offscreen; we hear it, but we don't see it.)

But the scrambled sequencing also somewhat obscures the old-fashioned melodrama of the screenplay. There are emotional and logistical absurdities in the plot that would be harder to swallow whole than in bite-sized pieces.

Penn's character is the least interesting, one more in the actor's gallery of self-centered assholes. (His best scene comes early, when he hauls himself and his oxygen tank to the bathroom to sneak a smoke.) Del Toro, on the other hand, gives an appealing heft to the haunted Jack; with his big shaggy head and painstakingly restrained lope, he's like a lion trying to reimagine himself as a lamb. The film picks up nice details of his devotion to a spartan inner-city church, presenting his struggle for faith without cynicism or sentimentality.

The story's central tragedy revolves around Cristina, and Watts provides a fierce emotional center. As a woman who has fought hard to assemble a life only to have it fall apart, she lets herself be sucked far into the depths of stultifying grief. She breaks herself into smaller and sharper pieces until it doesn't seem possible that anything can be put back together from them.

Of course, Inarritu wants his movie to be about that, about putting the pieces back together (hence the mosaic). But as his story coalesces toward a redemptive ending, it gains coherence at the expense of conviction. The inevitable grace notes feel flat and canned compared to the film's unruly anguish. The overheated final act (or what is eventually revealed to be the final act—its bits and pieces are scattered throughout the movie) undermines the integrity of the whole. The parts that ring true when you first encounter them end up feeling a little forced in retrospect. Inarritu wants the movie's moral to be a variation on the Serenity Prayer, all about sacrifice and forgiveness and accepting the things you can't change. But the fractured narrative, which feels like less than the sum of its parts, actually conveys something nearly opposite: There are some things—people, relationships, bodies—that break and can't be repaired.

21 Grams opens in Knoxville on Dec. 26.