Discover Top Posts Tagged with #21 grams

21 Grams

3.5/5

A meditation on grief, forgiveness and redemption that sometimes falls into navel gazing. Iñárritu maybe gives too much of the plot away with the non-linear structure and it sometimes feels like he’s meandering around his characters rather than digging into them. The strong performances really make this, particularly Benicio del Toro’s struggle with his actions as Jack find his faith pulled apart by a harrowing act of fate.

Letterboxd

#movies #21 grams #alejandro gonzález iñárritu

21 Grams (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2003)

Melissa Leo and Benicio Del Toro in 21 Grams

Cast: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Danny Huston, Melissa Leo, John Rubinstein, Clea DuVall, Eddie Marsan, Denis O’Hare. Screenplay: Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Brigitte Broch. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Gustavo Santaolalla.

An egg is an egg no matter how you scramble it. You can whip it into a meringue or a soufflé or an omelet, but it still retains its eggness. The same thing is true of melodrama: There’s no disguising its improbabilities and coincidences, its short cuts around motive and characterization, its intent to surprise and shock. Not that there’s anything wrong with melodrama. Some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, are grounded on it. It’s just that you have to approach it without pretension, which is the chief failing of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 21 Grams. The melodramatic premise is this: The recipient of a heart transplant falls in love with the donor’s widow, who then persuades him to try to kill the man who killed her husband. But Iñárritu takes screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s premise and scrambles it, using non-linear narrative devices – flashbacks and flashforwards – and casting an unrelievedly dark tone over it. The title refers to the study by a Massachusetts physician in 1907 that tried to weigh the human soul: He devised a sort of death-bed scales, which would register any loss of weight at the moment a patient died, thereby demonstrating to his satisfaction – if not to the medical and scientific communities – that the weight of the soul was approximately three-quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams. I suspect that Arriaga and Iñárritu meant the allusion to this bit of nonsense metaphorically, but it doesn’t come off that way. Iñarritu is one of our most celebrated contemporary directors, with back-to-back Oscars for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) to prove it, but here he gets caught up in narrative gimmicks that prevent him from delivering a completely satisfying film. The performances of Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, and Melissa Leo are as fine as their reputations suggest they would be. The narrative tricks are done with great skill, especially with the aid of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who uses color to make each of the narrative segments distinct from the others, so that when the film cuts from one to another, the viewer feels better oriented. And there’s no denying the emotional impact of the film as a whole. It could hardly be otherwise, given the pain suffered by the protagonists: Cristina (Watts), who lost her husband and her two little girls; Jack (Del Toro), the ex-con who accidentally killed them and believes that it was all because Jesus wanted it to happen; and Paul (Penn), who finds his chance at a new life marred by knowledge that it was at the expense of other people’s happiness. But in the end, all of this suffering is off-loaded onto us without any compensatory feeling of having been enlightened by it.

#21 Grams #Alejandro G. Iñárritu #2003 #Melissa Leo #Benicio Del Toro