Alexander Gonzalez Inarritu crosses over with integrity.
When 21 Grams ends, you know you've seen something. But what? Directed by Alexander Gonzalez Innaritu, this grungy drama about the intersecting lives of three flawed loners touched by tragedy is bravely acted, written and directed with conviction, and photographed and edited with great skill. Yet I fear the central quality that makes it feel most un-Hollywood?its prismatic, almost free-associative structure?ironically prevents it from delivering an emotional knockout punch. To borrow a Pauline Kael phrase, it's intellectualized pulp. When it's not tickling the structural-mathematical side of your brain, it's spritzing you with the emotional equivalent of pepper spray. I respected the movie in the abstract, and parts of it moved me, but I can't say that I loved it. But I can't stop thinking about it, and for that reason, I'm probably going to have to see it one or two more times.
Piece together the movie's fragmented storyline in your head afterward, and the whole contraption seems as ludicrous as the most luridly romantic thriller from the 1940. Yet the movie may hold the attention of the Plausibility police anyway, thanks to its forceful lead performances (by Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro and Melissa Leo), its savage bursts of violence and its unwavering tone of mournful machismo and existential awe. (I'll try to write around surprises in this review, but there are still plot spoilers ahead.)
Penn plays Paul Rivers, a mortally ill college professor awaiting a heart transplant alongside his patient wife, Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who hopes to get pregnant via artificial insemination in the likely event that Paul dies. Watts is Cristina Peck, a reformed party gal turned devoted wife and mother. Del Toro is Jack Jordan, an ex-con who came to Jesus and now works as a youth counselor at a church. Jack's supportive wife, Marianne (Melissa Leo) is less concerned with Jack's spiritual torment than with making sure he doesn't get caught. One of the film's most painful scenes finds her standing in front of Jack's truck in a field somewhere late at night, scrubbing blood from the front bumper. The three stories intersect when Cristina's husband and kids are killed in a cruelly random truck accident involving Jack, and Paul receives Cristina's husband's heart.
I've made these events sound as though they play out in coherent, orderly way. They don't. If you thought The Limey and Memento placed unconventional demands on the brain's narrative centers, you ain't seen nothing yet. 21 Grams careens from past to present to future tense within the space of a minute or less. A moment from the "end" of, say, Paul's story will be followed immediately by a moment from the "beginning" or the "middle," and the material seems arranged not according to content but meaning. By the film's final third, we start to deduce what goes where in the plot. But throughout much of 21 Grams, we don't know (and aren't told) whether a snippet's proper place is in the beginning, middle or end of the story. (The screenwriter is Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote Innaritu's debut feature, the narratively fractured slum melodrama Amores Perros. His work seems equally influenced by two Sams?Peckinpah and Shepard; a paperback edition of a play by the latter appears briefly onscreen.)
Thinking back on 21 Grams, I'm less taken with its major plot points (Paul being prepped for the heart transplant and, in a different scene, contemplating his own demise; the depressed, widowed Cristina seeking out an old friend who gives her drugs to ease her pain; Paul telling a tearful Cristina that the heart in his chest belonged to her husband; Jack, Cristina and Paul's stories intersecting in the desert in the finale) than with its smaller moments of character insight.
I loved the scenes where Paul, acting on information dug up by a private investigator, tails Cristina around town, driven equally by an urge to thank the person who saved his life and a desire to escape from a marriage that seems increasingly empty. (Penn is terrific here, much sharper and smaller than in Mystic River?nearly an icon. His creased face and deepened eyes befit his lifelong desire to earn comparisons with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. He has finally grown into his talent.) I like the fact that Paul continues to smoke even though he was fortunate enough to get a new heart to replace the one his lifestyle helped destroy; as he explains to his wife in a different context, while people always say they want to change, they usually don't. I love the moment at the wake for Cristina's family when her dad, who's widowed himself, reassures Cristina that life goes on, and she replies, "Life does not just go on." (After Mulholland Drive, a lot of people suspected Watts could be a major talent; this film proves them right.)
Most of all, I like any moment involving Jack, who becomes a monumentally average guy thanks to Del Toro's sensible, unaffected performance. He's no typical movie lowlife. He's a decent, broad-backed working stiff who wants to better his own life and others'. (He still has a temper, though, and is seen threatening to fight one of his delinquent charges and smacking his own son.) The accident, which happens right after Jack turns down an offer from a former boss to go out drinking, devastates him emotionally?and not just because he feels guilty for taking three innocent lives. Jack believes in Christ's redemptive power as well as his omniscience. The accident rattles Jack's faith; he feels he was living righteously but got punished anyway. Yet he still believes in doing the right thing. Resisting his wife's suggestion that he pretend the accident never happened, he asks, "What if these were our children?" Later, he inarticulately sums up his attitude toward taking responsibility for one's actions: "The decision I make? That's my mirror."
Would both the big and small moments in 21 Grams be more affecting if the story were presented in linear order? Perhaps. When your mind is occupied re-ordering a plot, it cannot concentrate fully on the emotions being depicted onscreen. The filmmakers have made a tradeoff: the chance to make an overwhelmingly powerful, very basic melodrama in exchange for the possibility of making a more reflective, ironic, puzzle-box kind of movie. That tradeoff represents the central conundrum of commercial narrative filmmaking. Movies like 21 Grams want to have it both ways?to be both affecting and clever. One quality opposes the other. But it's still fascinating to see them in conflict, especially in a movie made by artists.
Elf isn't a great children's movie or a great holiday movie, but it's sweet and kooky, and it has a great lead performance by Will Ferrell, who's not like anybody else in movies right now, or maybe ever. Playing Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole who comes to New York in search of his biological father (James Caan), he could have just mugged and pranced. Instead, he and director Jon Favreau engage with the material and construct a psychologically plausible character in the midst of a cheerfully ridiculous (at times raggedy-assed) story. Ferrell may have gained notice on Saturday Night Live, but he's not a typical sketch comedy, mug-and-pratfall-and-funny-accent guy. He's an actor in the tradition of Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers?malleable, at times nearly blank, but with a wary, intense, alienated intelligence. He's playing Ignatius Reilly right now in a movie version of A Confederacy of Dunces, directed by David Gordon Green (George Washington). I can't wait.