Hey folks, Harry here... Saw this while I was up in New York and it's just your basic light comedy... NOT! This film is an emotional raw nerve twitching and waiting to die. Inarritu's direction is raw and brutal. The film doesn't play nice, I'll get to my review later, for now, here's Capone...
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here. You know, sometimes you go into a film expecting little more than straight-up entertainment, which is great. Sometimes you get lucky and a film challenges you, either with strange and wonderful new ways of telling a story or with its subject matter. And once in a rare while, a film comes along that all of these things and more. This type of film is transcendent. Let me tell you about 21 GRAMS, a stunning mark of perfection from the writer-director team who gave us AMORES PERROS, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga. With only his second feature, the Mexican-born Inarritu has proven himself to be a filmmaker capable of piecing together a story with such a unique vision and pulling shockingly stark and raw performances out of actors whose best work we’d thought we’d seen already.
As well done as AMORES PERROS was, I wasn’t quite prepared for the depth that Inarritu brings to 21 GRAMS. [I should throw in here that his short film for BMW, “The Powder Keg,” and the powerful entry he made for 11’09”01 (SEPTEMBER 11) are well worth seeking out.] There’s a maturity and grace to this film that almost defies description. And it’s impossible to due justice to the brilliant piecing together of three storylines brought together by a single tragic accident. Unlike with AMORES PERROS, Inarritu and Arriaga do not present us with three stories that all intersect at a single point. Instead, it almost seems that these three storylines were filmed in sequence and then send through a shredder and pieced together randomly to form the finished product. Events and characters are shown in different stages of healthy and unhealthy, happy and unhappy, clean and dirty; and for a while, it’s tough to get your bearings. But as the film progresses, you realize there is nothing random about how the film is edited. Key scenes that reveal huge question marks in our head are saved until we’re at the point of blowing a gasket in anticipation. How does Sean Penn’s critically ill mathematician Paul go from being a wheezing wreck of a man in one scene to a vibrant love machine in the next. In some moments, we see Naomi Watts’ Christina happily married to Danny Huston to rolling around in bed with Penn. And where exactly does born-again ex-con Jack (Benicio Del Toro) fit into all of this? At times, he’s a family man helping run a center for wayward youths; in other scenes, he’s a grimy mess loading sacks of some industrial looking substance at a factory. By showing us events so wildly out of order, every scene gain more importance. We’re forced to pay attention in our efforts to place the events in some kind of chronological order. 21 GRAMS is not a film you can watch passively. Whether you want to or not, your brain will be switched on and turned to 11 the whole time.
But is the story, once pieced together, one worth watching even in the correct order? Oh, hell yes. Each one of these characters goes through life-altering events in the course of the movie. And the subtext of these accounts is enough to make your mind spin. Questions about the value of human life, what makes a person good or bad, and the age-old issues about the importance of spirituality haunt these poor people. There are no bad people in 21 GRAMS, but there are enough bad things happening to good people to make you start to thing that the real villain in these stories is a certain higher power Himself. If I’m being a little less detail oriented than usual, it’s because 21 GRAMS is about discovery, and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s chance to discover this wonderful film. This is a film with great meaning, impact, and strength. Oh, in case you’re wondering or haven’t heard, the title refers to the supposed weight the human body loses immediately upon death. People have speculated about what this weight is or what it represents. Some say it’s the soul or simple that which makes us individual. Films like this make me feel that I’ve gained 21 grams worth of soul.
Capone
