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November 10, 2003
OGIC: Hole in the heart
As noted by Terry below, I finally got around to my second viewing of the great Lost in Translation this weekend. Although this screening was marred by Loud Talkers all around us (for instance, after a shot that emphasized Scarlett Johansson's vanishingly modest belly: "She's pregnant!"), it was still amazing. In fact, this time around it made me cry (that's for you, Lizzie). And it certified my disappointment in 21 Grams.21 Grams is the kind of bad movie that gets good reviews. I'm sure it will get more of them when it opens nationally later this month. Why? It is wonderful to look at; its haunting soundtrack is used with dead-on precision; it gets fantastic performances from Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts (the film's deliberately grainy look heightens the weathered beauty of Watts's features; half its emotional effect comes from just looking at her); and for a good hour or so, it holds your curiosity at highest attention. Also, it has one stock scene--in which bad news is delivered--that is one of the most affecting of its kind I've ever seen. So the people who made this film really know what they're doing. They've got the chops. But they're playing a feeble tune.
The director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, shows every sign of being a gifted filmmaker. Here, though, his skills serve a story that is maudlin and contrived. It takes a while for this to become apparent, thanks to a radically splintered timeline that is easily more disorienting than any of its obvious models--say, Reservoir Dogs or The Limey. About halfway through, a key piece of the puzzle emerges and allows you to make out the story--and it sank my heart to see the shards fit together into something ripped straight from the Lifetime channel.At its best, 21 Grams trains a microscope on three characters' interlocking varieties of grief springing from a single tragedy. But it doesn't seem satisfied to evoke and explore these strong feelings. Instead, the script is led astray by a quasi-mystical, dead-end fascination with the way disparate lives can briefly intersect and change forever. The film returns to one such intersection obsessively, scrutinizing the random events that lead there more and more minutely. But despite all this trawling for meaning, it doesn't find anything more than pure accident. Its fruitless fixation comes to reek of melodrama, undercutting the movie's best feature: the astringent realism of its visual style.
That's the hell of it. Visually, the movie is so eloquent, bracing, and always new. Narratively, it can only repeat its threadbare mantra: "look at how this chance event changed the courses of all these lives." After enough of this I couldn't help but feel it mawkish, an effect that no number of ravishing shots could reverse.
If 21 Grams finds nothing meaningful or foreshadowing in the paths that lead to the tragedy, it does even worse with the aftermath. The chain of consequences is hard to buy. The characters' motivations grow increasingly cryptic, like the title. If you've seen the preview you know what "21 grams" signifies. It's suggestive, but in the end just a fancy synonym for death--one more element of this movie that is more bark than bite.
Iñárritu's interest in coincidence, chance, and unforeseen connections reminds me a bit of the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, especially his Three Colors Trilogy. But I like the Kieslowski films so much more. They are less naturalistic, staging coincidences that are improbable to the point of fantasy. Yet they seem to me somehow truer, more revealing of the way the world is and the ways we inhabit it.
One more thing: when was the last time Sean Penn played a regular guy? Because it was kind of hilarious watching him try to do it here. The effort of his restraint really shows. He plays a math professor, and the one scene that requires him to talk about math is giggle-inducing. I like Penn, but his hothead performance in Mystic River was too showy for my tastes, and here he is plainly miscast. Maybe he just hasn't found the range yet for this latest stage of his career.
Although I was disappointed by 21 Grams, I'm not sorry I saw it. And I can't deny that it has the aura of something serious and important. Yet I deeply suspect that if you took its narrative liberties away from it (I was going to call them "innovations," but by now this kind of jumping around in time is just one more cinematic convention) and watched the film in chronological order, it would look distinctly pedestrian. Like I suggested above, I'm not convinced that very much more than window dressing distinguishes 21 Grams from the stuff running on Lifetime.
Posted November 10, 2003 12:16 PM
