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There’s a lot to admire in 21 Grams, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro give heart-wrenching performances, the cinematography is gorgeous, the script feels emotionally honest even when it strains credibility with its coincidences, yet I cannot get behind it’s unconventional structure. I’ve said it before, but I think a story really needs to have a bigger reason for being non-linear than “just because” and 21 Grams falls into the “just because” camp.
This is problematic because I feel like if it had played it straight through the entire effect would have hit you harder. I don’t mind flashbacks or flashforwards, but when a film begins at the end, jumps to the middle, then to a little before the end, then circles back to the beginning, it gets a little grating. This editing choice keeps us at arm’s length from a story that wants us to feel that every choice has a strong impact at a later point, so it confuses me why they threw it together in such a way.
And aside from a few story beats that feel contrived, Sean Penn’s character is little more than a walking/talking plot device, that’s about it when it comes to constructive criticism regarding the film. Everything else works for me.
To try and explain the story really involves me trying to weave three separate story threads together. Penn’s doesn’t always work for me, but Del Toro and Watts, the film’s MVP as far as I’m concerned, work magic with the material. Watts plays a recovering drug addict, now married and with two daughters, who loses all three of them in a car accident. As she tries to pick the pieces of her life back together she relapses and begins making a series of bad decision, this is highly understandable and we feel for her. Yet her character displays a core of strength, an iron will to survive and move on from this catastrophe, which we hope she’ll rediscover and utilize to pull herself back together and let the healing process begin. Watts is an insanely underrated and talented actress – was there a better performance in 2001 than her work in Mulholland Drive? Her Oscar nomination for this was deserved, and a bit shocking. Watts isn’t exactly an actress to go for the big obvious emotion, frequently preferring to quietly play a scene and let her intensity build from there.
Del Toro plays a former convict turned fundamentalist Christian, Melissa Leo plays his wife with a very low bullshit tolerance. She grateful that he’s reached a point of sobriety, but is questionable about his “cure,” openly suspecting a transference of his addictions. But hey, at least this one doesn’t end with him missing and on a multiple day bender. It’s hard to discuss how good of work they do without spoiling how his story interconnects with Penn and Watts, but Del Toro finds the core of truth in this man. And Leo is always a welcome presence in my home, able to slip so easily into whatever character she is playing at that moment with no big effort being shown.
21 Grams tells a haunting and deeply sensitive story the long way around, but there’s a lot of admire on the route. At its core, this is an old-fashioned melodrama with implausible connections, but its earnest in detailing how people struggle to survive a trauma. The non-linear structure allows us to live in these moments fully, but diminishes the overall impact of them. Sometimes doing something in the tightly structured plot diagram manner is the better choice to get the full force of your work out there.
