Film Review of 21 Grams
Year: 2003 Reviewer: Chris Docker
Lots of awards and nominations went to this film - which is basically a fairly unimaginative story told in a very imaginative way (and with outstanding acting from heartthrob hunk Benicio Del Toro, the skilful Naomi Watts, and a remarkably restrained Sean Penn).
The 'imaginative storytelling' involves a definite goodbye to linear storytelling. This is not an assortment of flashbacks, or flashbacks within flashbacks, but a jigsaw pattern of pieces from different timeframes in the characters' lives that the audience has to piece together to find out what has happened.
We see Sean Penn on a ventilator, criss-cross to him a respectable cool-dude, criss-cross again to him as gun-toting nutter(?) . . . and re-criss-cross till you are forced to start thinking laterally. What happened to him to encompass such contrasts?
Same thing with Naomi Watts (who played the wonderfully mysterious character in Mulholland Drive). We see her as stressed out druggie, as beautiful, well-balanced wife and mother in standard well-to-do American household, one minute her husband is there and she's obviously devoted to him, another minute she's having sexy kit-off love scenes with someone else. What???? Arrrrgh!!
21 Grams however, unlike Mulholland Drive, all comes to form a whole in logical order and without repeated viewing or intense study. The pieces fall together with dramatic clarity. There's been a hit and run, Benicio is a convict turned born-again Christian, and there's a heart transplant that figures pretty centrally. 21 Grams is, we are told, the weight of a chocolate bar, but we are given to understand that everyone loses 21 Grams at the moment of death (these philosophical stretches of the imagination are a bit harder to take in, but poetically they add up, also as the 'weight of true love' for instance.)
Virginia Woolf once said "My difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot . . . though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to throw the reader." The same might have been said by the writer of 21 Grams. It is not obscure or impossible, but it is very creative cinematic style - be prepared to concentrate hard.
But remarkable and accomplished piece of film-making though it is, the length of two hours plus is slightly overkill. Having grasped the (ultimately fairly hackneyed) story I didn't really need the point laboured for the last half hour or so, but at least it was continually enlivened by fabulous acting and script. A film I'm pleased I didn't miss, but more the entrée for a new type of dish than a sophisticated example.
Rating: 8/10
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