21 Grams - Shaken & Stirred

my rating: Nathan's rating:

21 Grams is a film that's difficult to get into, and I can see why it'd be easy to dislike. For one thing, it's a gritty, and generally unpleasant view of the lives of its main characters. It's a story full of sickness, death, crime, ruined lives, empty relationships, and so on. It's meant to make the viewer uneasy, and it succeeds.

But the biggest reason for it inaccessibility is the chronology of the scenes, which are presented very much out of order, and in incomplete snippets. We get a bit of Sean Penn in a hospital on the edge of death, then after another scene we see him walking about, healthy. Is it a flashback or a preview? Here's Benicio del Toro clumsily preaching the simplistic tenets of prison Christianity to a street punk, then a scene later he's being escorted to a jail cell. Which came first? To say nothing of the brief bit we see at the beginning of the film, of its climax: Penn, del Toro, and Naomi Watts are all in it, but it makes no sense because we have context for it, and it continues to make no sense for quite a while, because these three characters have nothing to do with each other in most of the scenes that "follow".

With enough attention and patience, the picture gradually emerges. Most importantly, about halfway through, it becomes clear what initially ties the three main characters together: by sheer coincidence, each of their lives intersects with a single character. He appears in only a couple snippets, with only a few lines of dialog and little characterisation, but in one way or another, he (or more to the point, his death) has a major impact on their lives. As I said, it ain't pretty.

Nathan complained about the non-linear storytelling, wondering what the point of it was. What it provided was some rather literalistic foreshadowing of where the story would go and how it might get there. So when you see (for example) Penn and Watts meet, you know (or at least have an idea) what it will lead to. But there are also twists and setbacks which require you to keep revising your interpretation of what you've seen.

The performances are all first-rate, and that made me care enough about the characters to pay attention to the jigsaw puzzle of scenes. And toward the end the scenes do seem to become a bit more orderly... or maybe since I already had the majority of the puzzle laid out, it was easier to put each new scene in its proper place in my head. The movie does save a few surprises for the final scenes (which do take place at the end of the chronology), though they're a bit heavy-handed on the irony for my taste.

Likewise the concept behind the title, which is a reference to a bit of folklore claiming that the body loses exactly 21 grams of mass at the moment of death. The religious implications of that are profound... but it's nothing more than fiction, so it doesn't hold up the weighty philosophical ponderings offered via voiceover at the end.