Running Time: 125 min
Rating: R
In Stephen Daldry’s brilliant The Hours, the claim is made by Virginia Woolf that in her book, ‘One of them must die so that the rest can appreciate life.’ Now I do not know if Woolf would have agreed with that statement but I do know that despite that movie’s general theme of depression and suicide, the end was actually uplifting. Despite spending 100 minutes on maudlin themes, the end wrapped everything together in a justification of living. I suspect that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director of
The well-constructed intertwining story involves three main characters. Paul (Sean Penn) is a math professor whose failing heart is given a second chance by a last second donor. Christina (Naomi Watts) was a happily married homemaker whose husband and two daughters were killed by an out of control driver. Finally, Jack (Benicio Del Toro) is a lifetime criminal who has found Jesus and is trying to keep himself out of trouble for the sake of his own family. Their stories will bump into each other and converge both by accident and on purpose but that is not quite obvious from the get-go. You see, the story is told in a non-chronological fashion. One moment we will observe Paul wheezing and on oxygen and in the next, he’s shot. Needless to say, until the audience gets their bearings, this is a confusing first twenty minutes. I won’t go into how the stories intertwine and intersect except to say that they smash together in important ways twice with dire consequences from each.
To begin with, I congratulate Inarritu and his cameraman for giving a fantastically gritty look to this film. I have not been this impressed with the realistic qualities of a film for some time. The movie seems to have been shot entirely in real locations and they evoke some great feelings from it. The acting, as one would expect from a trio like this, is quite good. Del Toro, in particular, is fantastic in showing a born-again Christian who suddenly finds himself questioning the point of his conversion. But this is all somewhat underwhelmed by the non-chronological structure and the general attitude of the film.
Pulp Fiction proved that this style of filmmaking could be done well without much confusion. How? Because Tarentino made the scenes long enough so that we got a sense of character and motivation. Memento used shorter scenes but through the uses of color (and lack thereof) and a definite back-tracking narrative, the movie was logical. 21 Grams seems to have been constructed with all the care of someone putting the screenplay in the blender and hitting mince. The scenes we get are too short to really affect us and as we become confused and obsessed with putting the pieces of the puzzle in the right place, the fragmented story begins to seem pretentious and self-serving. Because once you have all the information, the pieces are more interesting than the whole; one could certainly not say the same about <I>Memento</I>.
This sloppily handled story structure pretty much delivers a karate chop to the rest of the film’s elements. I second-guessed the acting because if someone just showed me videotape of someone crying at a funeral and then snorting coke, I would be shocked. But if someone showed me everything leading up to both points, I wouldn’t be as shocked and, most importantly, I wouldn’t be nearly as impressed with the acting. The music also deserves its own special place in hell sounding like a cross between a wandering accordionist and a guitar playing random melodies. This isn’t inherently bad but it is placed in such odd spots that in the final half hour it becomes humorous.
I’m divided about the movie. There are wonderful scenes. Jack’s confrontation with his preacher is a fantastic dialogue between choice and fate and God’s will. But it is too short, and not really referred to again. A scene of raw emotion between Christina and Paul is played perfectly. But it ends rather unconvincingly. There seems to be a lot of good here but not enough followthrough. And don’t get me started on the end monologue (stolen directly from the trailer, by the way). If I need every single point summed up in a self-righteous two minutes, then I’ll listen to it and not the two hour movie that preceded it.
The main flaw with 21 Grams, though, is largely the last half hour. The plot points begin to fray and you can see the machinery clunking away trying to get our protagonists to meet once again. And as the movie closes it gets harder and harder to sympathize or even empthasize with any of these people. They are all inherently self destructive and in their final confrontation, no matter how bloody and violent, you get the feeling that they are getting some sick joy from it all. When one of them finally dies, I half expected the other two to get together because their combined self-imposed misery would be bliss.
Main characters die in both The Hours and 21 Grams, but at least in the former I felt that something had been accomplished, points had been made. But in 21 Grams the flashy camerawork and non-narrative story think they’re dissuading you from the point, but they’re not. You’ve known the point since the beginning and that makes the ending that much more anticlimactic.