21 Grams Release Date: November 21, 2003 Starring: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro Directed by: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/20/03)
Alejandro González Iñárritu is a filmmaker with a big heart and a big vision, but while his first feature, the 2001 Mexican sensation Amores Perros, had the urgency of a police bulletin, his new picture and first English-language feature, 21 Grams, is a too-laborious meditation on life and death. (The title alludes to the amount of weight said to disappear from a person upon dying.) Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro play three equally desperate characters whose lives intersect and then diverge throughout the picture. That’s largely because 21 Grams doesn’t tell its story chronologically; scenes from every spot on its time line play out, seemingly willy-nilly, until they pretty much, well, run out.
The pick-up-sticks structure is probably intended as a statement about every ending being a beginning, but it mainly serves to camouflage the similarities the movie’s story and reflections have to other works: Penn’s own The Crossing Guard, Eastwood’s Blood Work, Amores Perros itself, the Grand Inquisitor stuff in Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, etc.
Iñárritu handles a lot of tough material with commendable integrity, and the acting is terrific, but to be honest, after about an hour and 20 minutes, I began to get a strong urge to be watching Trouble in Paradise. It doesn’t quite help that cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto goes for the kind of gritty realism that makes even the healthiest characters in the picture look like they’re about to drop dead.
Mistaking the will to profundity with the realization of same, all that 21 Grams manages to achieve (per Woody Allen’s coinage) is “heavyosity.” It would be better titled 16 Tons.
