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directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu website |
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's first film, Amores Perros (2000) translates into English from the Spanish as "Love's a Bitch." I guess for his second film, 21 Grams, he wanted a more positive message: Love is still a bitch, but Fate can be kind, in an ironic and painful fashion. It's a small glimmer – a feeble light in an unrelentingly dark story. A light made particularly faint with a deservingly controversial structure, which mixes time and tone constantly, like faint snatches of memories, all confused in our twilight brains. The only true light here is that exhibited by the actors (but more on that later). 21 Grams does not have a linear narrative. But if it did, this is what it'd be: A professor of mathematics (Sean Penn) is dying because of a failing heart. An ex-con (Benicio Del Toro) trying to go straight has given himself over to Jesus but still manages to run over a man and his two daughters. The dead man's heart is placed inside of the dying professor. With a good heart in his chest the professor find's the donor's wife (Naomi Watts). They fall in love, sort of, and decide to murder the ex-con. Fate intrudes so that life does go on, justice is dealt (kinda) and faith is restored. What we see, instead, on the screen is a narrative that isn't interested in narrative. It wants to tell a different story – a story about fate, about something bigger than mere characters. It reaches very high and the process is very confusing. The first half hour cuts randomly from middle, end and beginning – like those Dadaist experiments where images were torn up, thrown up in the air and let fall to their accidental end. The middle hour is near tortuous because just as we grasp the narrative, it refuses to allow us any emotional connections. The last block is just frustrating. We know we're watching a very important film, we know we're witnessing some great performances, but the movie pulls away, again and again, just as we reach for some catharsis. Pulp Fiction, Godfather III, Memento have all played with narrative timelines. Harold Pinter wrote a play, Betrayal, which told its story backwards, from the end to the beginning of an affair. Many of us watch television series out of sequence; we can grasp story lines in 30 seconds or less; a video may flash a hundred images which our brain scans instantly into a story. These experiments are a century old or more, and what we have learned is the one thing the modernist, the avant-garde and then the post-modernist were hoping to dispel: People like to feel; feel connected to the characters, feel for their choices and feel for their fates. Not some Brechtian shaming of emotions; but a full operatic embrace. Tell the story any way you want, just allow me my cathartic moment. The one great fault of 21 Grams, its smarty-pants undoing, is its one brilliant smarty-pants choice. It chooses to tell a story with a confused narrative structure but it fails to deliver a true ah-ha moment. The ending is almost clichéd, the story reveals itself to be almost soapish, and the whole thing at the end feels lighter than its title weight. And, that's too bad, because it is a very smart film, very well made, with great command and authority and confidence. And it contains a hand full of brilliant performances that deserve our emotional attention. Naomi Watts is stellar. Her Cristina, though the poorest written of the three roles, is also the most dramatic. Fuelled by love, confusion, loss and finally revenge, Cristina balances precariously on the razor's edge between imploding and exploding. And Watts walks that edge, perfectly, not a lost moment, or gesture. So desperate is 21 Grams to keep us from feeling anything for these characters, that Cristina's one great moment of absolute emotion, hearing about the death of her family, is given not to Watts but to Clea Duvall who plays her sister. Duvall is on screen for less than two minutes, but she is bright and brilliant in every one of those seconds. She is currently in an HBO series called Carnivale, where she is wonderful. Sadly the series had grown weird and wandering by the time I dropped out at episode 6. Benecio Del Toro has the fullest part – and his story is told in the most linear fashion of the three. The best part is he's audible – throughout – it's a wonderful addition to his usual style. As Jack Jordan, an ex-con on a spiritual search, he is one scary dude. Tattooed, greasy, dirty – he's always dirty – he's a physical representation of a man trying to wash off his sins. Shamed in the eyes of his own children, he is a hollow man, ready to disintegrate. But Del Toro never lets him slip too far, or turn him into a comic fantasy of horror. Finally there's Sean Penn, the finest actor of his generation, who, we hope, has given up on writing/directing tiresomely dark movies with Jack Nicholson, and will return fully to the one thing he does better than no one else. The death pallor that clings to Paul Rivers, the dying professor, oozes from Penn's pores. Watching Penn in pretty much anything, except the Madonna-movie, has been a true pleasure for two decades. And, it's ultimately a tribute to him, and his acting colleagues, that their performances survive the editing to which they are subjected. Though dying, and in part happily dying, sick of himself and his own body, Penn's character still manages moments of hope and life. Here's wishing Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu learns something from his own character. Inarritu is a very talented filmmaker, one capable of writing for an edit suite. Let's hope his youthful love of ‘seriousness' gives way to a little more joy – live a little, laugh a little, and lighten up a lot. |
