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21 Grams
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One of the first things you’ll notice about 21 Grams is its fractured chronology, initially a head scratching mixture of events and confrontations. Scenes take large leaps up and down its time line without obvious distinctions between them, confidently unrestrained by conventional ordering and cause and effect structure. At first the scattered puzzle of events is difficult to piece together, but soon finds a blistering momentum as every cell in its vividly detailed body comes together to form a grand portrait that won’t stop expanding until it theorizes about the nature of life itself.
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Sean Penn's new film, 21 Grams, is a brilliant piece about sin and redemption and the journey through the human shadow. It's a dark and foreboding film but it is deeply moving; his co-actors, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts, are brilliant. It is said that the human body loses 21 grams in weight at death and there is a wonderful line in the script when Penn asks, "How much does a human's love weigh?"
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As with Amores Perros, the time-frame of 21 Grams flits backwards and forwards, something which is no mean feat and could easily result in nothing more than confusion. In the hands of Alejandro González Iñárritu... it is handled masterfully. There are three or four threads of the story being thrown at the viewer at the same time, but this merely leads to a heightened sense of intrigue rather than confusion, and lends the film a pace which is pitch-perfect.
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With 21 Grams, Sean Penn has given yet another utterly outstanding performance. His work here is more subdued than his role in Mystic River, as he is playing a dying man haunted by his past, but it is no less impressive or powerful. Penn does more expressive acting with his eyes and body language than most actors can do with speech; his final, largely wordless (except for a voice-over) moments on screen are some of the most haunting you will ever experience.
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Since 21 Grams is a pretty intense picture dealing with murder, drugs and possibly salvation, he made clear to point out that the set was actually pretty fun. “It was a great environment. A sense of humor. A lot of humor. It’s the only thing to lose the stress with. It was intense, but it was nice.
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It's said all humans mysteriously lose 21 grams upon their death, a notion that inspires much hard-boiled philosophizing in Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's structurally ambitious follow-up to Amores Perros. As in that film, several characters’ lives become intertwined via a tragic accident, but here told via a chronologically disjointed structure that's a masterfully wrought puzzle of editing and plot construction. Given that unusual structure, the musical soundtrack by Gustavo Santolalla by necessity carries much of the film's mood and emotional undercurrents in its spare, brooding cues and occasional songs. The composer's primary instruments here are a heavy-vibrato electric guitar (its tone reminiscent of the great Ry Cooder) and an equally altered accordion, set against a ambient wash of electronics and percussion that's so murky as to often seem impenetrable. The Kronos Quartet admirably matches the mood with their closing rendition of the haunting "When Our Wings Are Cut, Can We Still Fly." The hip-hop swing of Ozomati's "Cut Chemist Suite" and R&B of Ann Sexton help anchor it in a more familiar frame of reference, while Benicio del Toro's spooky, spoken-word take on "Shake, Rattle and Roll" (a performance recorded in Memphis' legendary Sun Studios, no less) effectively channels Tom Waits by way of David Lynch.
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21 Grams