21 Grams
(2004)
|
Paul (Sean Penn) has less than a month to live, he's on the waiting list for a heart transplant, and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is determined to get pregnant with his child before it's too late. Meanwhile, Cristina (Naomi Watts) is a happy mother with a loving husband and two daughters but she loses her family in an instant to an unpredictable accident. Finally, Jack (Benicio Del Toro) is an ex-con and born-again Christian struggling to support his wife and two children while battling his own guilty conscience. When these three parties come together, explosively, they make each other behave in impulsive, violent, and destructive ways. 21 Grams takes the viewer on a jolting journey through sickness, suffering, morality, revenge, and last but not least, the sometimes welcome peace of death. |
The awesome aspiration of 21 Grams is to understand the human soul; the title referring to the weight supposedly lost at the moment of death — a spiritual measure. Showcasing some of the year's finest screen acting — from Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro — Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has created an astonishing account of faith and redemption. As with Iñárritu's first film, the acclaimed Amores Perros, an auto accident links three disparate lives: Watts's husband and two daughters have been run over and killed by Benicio Del Toro's drunk-turned-Jesus freak; Penn's maths professor receives the husband's heart and is eventually drawn into an affair with his widow. Their fates are bound as the extended aftermath of the central tragedy unravels. Iñárritu again uses a non-linear, mosaic narrative technique to lure us into a maze of contradictions that eventually lead to revelation — it is an extraordinary vision.
Halliwell's Film Guide
A film told in a non-chronological fashion that makes its audience work hard enough for them to feel they have experienced something out of the ordinary, but its melodramatic plot contrivances are more suited to soap opera than a serious work.