21 Grams - C+
Now Playing: (2003, Alejandro Gonzalez I?arritu) [seen in theatre]
What a crushing disappointment this film was for me. I loved the director's previous film, the raw Amores Perros, so I was expecting a lot from his follow-up, but in the end he goes to such great lengths to deliver the goods that they arrive a bit stale. Much of this can be attributed to the way he, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, and editor Stephen Mirrione have structured the film, with the chronology splinted into small pieces and then re-assembled out of order. Not an ineffective technique in theory, but here the structuring mostly felt arbitrary to me. There didn't seem to be a compelling reason for telling the story this way, beyond simply showing off, which is probably the least compelling reason there is. Which is not to say that had the film been narrated in a straightforward manner that it would've all been fixed- the story is too overwrought and reliant on dimestore irony for that- but it would've been less grating, that's for sure. As a result of the non-linear chronology the film doesn't so much build as simply skip around, like playing a CD recording of an opera on shuffle mode. Because of this lack of inertia, character progression and the audience engagement in same is lost, which is fatal in a film with such a bleak worldview as this. And because I mostly failed to become engaged in the people onscreen, the film was reduced to being a wallow in my opinion. Not that I have a problem with unpleasant films (Irreversible, anyone?), but at least that film used its extreme bleakness and its non-chronological timeline in the service of thought-provoking ideas, whereas what this film seemed to convey to me basically amounted to "life sucks, deal with it", which I've heard before, thank you very much. The one exception to my lack of engagement came in Benicio Del Toro's storyline, where he plays a born-again Christian who comes to believe God has failed him after a tragedy comes into his life- his performance here was spot-on, like in the early scenes where he spouts Christian rhetoric in a way that sounds less like hard belief than an incantation to keep his demons at bay. Later on in the story, after the central accident, his rudderlessness generates, if not sympathy, then a certain level of interest that is largely absent from the film's other two main characters. Sean Penn does capable work here but never manages to make his character especially compelling, and Naomi Watts is done no favors by the filmmakers as she wavers emotionally from scene to scene. All in all, pretty unfortunate, and if the rating seems high it's because isolated moments of effectiveness make it impossible for me to in good conscience rate it any lower (the accident is filmed beautifully and with surprising restraint, under the circumstances). Just wish I?arritu and company hadn't gotten in the way, ya know?