Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (March 26, 2004)

21 Grams

Universal Home Video VHS & DVD 2 hrs 5 mins Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

"21 Grams" director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's meditation on sin, and redemption, is an effective yet empty experience that includes the better of Sean Penn's two celebrated performances from 2003. Inarritu announced himself loudly with 2001's "Amores Perros," which, like "21 Grams," was told in a fractured form interweaving three different stories set in an apocalyptic Mexico City. The stories in "Amores Perros" had a compelling energy and depth that raised the film above its own loftiness: It is fun watching these characters self-destruct on a colorfully Biblical level. "21 Grams," however, feels like it is preaching, thus destroying the audience's good time.

Set in an unnamed city (the film was partly shot in Memphis), "21 Grams" introduces us to Paul Rivers (Sean Penn), a mathematician slowly dying from a defective heart. He is also slowly wasting away from urban discontent with his child-starved wife Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who, in fairness, dotes over Paul with conditional affection. A middle-of-the-night phone call announces that a donor heart has been found, and Paul quickly rushes to the hospital for a successful operation. Later, driven by restlessness and guilt, Paul searches for the donor's widow, Cristina Peck (Naomi Watts), whose husband and children were accidentally hit by ex-con Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro). Paul and Christina develop a sad relationship, based upon the ghosts of Christina's dead family, and she recruits the willing Paul to enact revenge against Jack. All, of course, turns out for the worst.

"21 Grams" plays like a movie-of-the-week, detailing a sobering, strangely conservative account of some desperate people. The characters are so depressing in fact that the film's one lighthearted moment, Paul's first smile at the charming of Christina by telling her the dangers of eating alone, seems almost out of place in the film. It's as if Mexican director Inarritu thought that in order to make a "serious" American film, he should cut out all forms of personal happiness from the script (which may be the impressions our dramas give the rest of the world). It is Del Toro's Jack, however, that personifies and elevates "21 Grams" from what could have been an unbearably dreary experience. Jack is a classic Inarritu character: a convict who looks for God in convenient places; a man who says one thing and does another; a person who loves his family but does not know how they personally fit into his life. He is a desperate and lonely man who is at once intimidating and sympathetic, and Del Toro, with his puppy dog eyes and Falstaff physique, makes Jack the center of the film's uneven maelstrom. -Joe Ramirez

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