WhatzUp

21 Grams
by Derek Neff

All of the events in 21 Grams center around a single tragic event, an accident which binds the fates of three very different people: Paul Rivers (Sean Penn), who will die if he doesn’t get a heart transplant very soon; Jack (Benicio del Toro), a born-again Christian who struggles to do the right thing after doing a very wrong thing; and Cristina (Naomi Watts), a grieving woman who finds she cannot go on until she has exacted vengeance on the one person who has destroyed her life.

The action in 21 Grams is told jarringly out of sequence, and it isn’t until we’ve been watching for awhile that we begin to piece together a rough chronology of events on our own. On paper, this shouldn’t work: the sheer amount of background information to piece together should mean that the movie’s earlier scenes will leave us completely baffled and frustrated. Indeed, some viewers will grow frustrated at their own initial disorientation and give up. But I would encourage all viewers to hang in there and go with the flow.

The movie is all about flow, after all. There is a profound effect that comes from fragmenting and then scrambling the events chronologically. Since we at first cannot parse out cause from effect, we confuse the two and begin to realize that the continuum of one’s life is more complex than a mere chain of linear events. One’s soul - to use a weighty but, in this context, entirely appropriate word - drives one’s past and informs one’s future, and the two swim in and out of each other in a way that seems, in its way, immutable and absolutely convincing. In one scene, we see Jack trying to lead a teenager away from a life of crime and violence, and soon after we see Jack being led into a jail cell, and we do not know yet which preceded the other, or how Jack would have wound up in either situation. Director Alejandro Gonz·lez In·rritu (who, on the evidence of this film and his previous masterwork, Amores Perros, is hands-down one of the best directors working today), working with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, wisely realizes that the best way to pique our interest is to make us do some of the footwork ourselves.

And we want to do the footwork, because we quickly begin to care very deeply about these characters. Without strong actors and a strong screenplay, this mosaic story-structure would be impossible to follow and could be written off as mere formalist gimmickry. But Penn and Del Doro and Watts are every bit as good as their collective slew of awards nominations earlier this year would suggest. Despite the disjunctive chronology, each scene is fully fleshed out and emotionally honest, pitch-perfect in tone and pacing.

Put simply, 21 Grams is an astonishing achievement.