Like a smashed mirror, Alejandro González Iñárritu's enigmatic new movie shows us broken lives in shards of fear. At its centre is a terrible accident whose impact has shattered everyone involved, and the movie itself is picking up the pieces and reassembling the truth.
The narrative is busted up, as if being remembered by someone in shock. A woman takes cocaine in a ladies' room. Birds scatter against an evening sky. A couple has angry and despairing sex. A man lies dying in the back of a car. Autumnal leaves flutter down at nightfall. What can it all mean?
Originally written by Guillermo Arriaga in Spanish and set in Mexico City - but now revised into English and set in grimy downtown Memphis - 21 Grams is a melodrama given intriguing dimensions of mystery and meditation by detaching it from the cause-and-effect world of regular storytelling. As in films by Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino or Gus Van Sant, we see scenes out of order; we see the same scenes from different angles; moments and images are introduced to rhyme visually with each other.
For some, this shuffling may be spurious, and once the jigsaw is assembled, the completed picture might not look quite as startling as its disordered state might originally have promised. But the process is all, precipitating moments of horror and strangeness impossible with a conventional story.
It lets the director dive boldly into the mystery of individual experience and identity, and shows us the poetry as well as the prose of his characters' lives. Most importantly, the movie has three absolutely outstanding performances from Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts. Between them, they offer a compelling triptych of human pain.
Like his debut movie Amores Perros, this has a subdued and grainy, bleached-out visual look and, like that movie, it brings three lives and three stories arbitrarily together through the device of an automobile crash. But unlike Amores Perros, it is far from clear how and where and when exactly this crash is supposed to fit in.
Penn plays Paul, a mathematics professor with an interest in poetry, evidently an urbane and worldly man whose relationship with his English wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is beginning to go sour: they have only just got back together after his infidelities with students. What is keeping them together is evidently his serious illness; we see Penn in hospital waiting for a heart transplant, and limping around at home, his vulpine handsomeness given a sensitive, even fastidious look by the lines of middle age.
Benicio Del Toro is Jack, a tough ex-con, who is doggedly going straight through having found Jesus in a tragically confused and uncomprehending way. The preacher who has converted Jack keeps him on the straight and narrow as best he can by letting him collect hymn books at the end of services and even counsel some of his troubled flock. But Jack is obviously still as violent and confused as some of the people he is supposed to be helping. Del Toro superbly conveys Jack's self-loathing, his muddled grasp of what a moral life can mean and his pitiful yearning to punish and be punished.
First among equals in this cast is Naomi Watts as Cristina Peck, the amiable wife and mother with a secret problem. Watts's work in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was captivating; here it is even more sustained and refined. She conjures moments of extraordinary emotional power, turning on a sixpence from calm to rage, from passion to despair - but always with absolute authenticity and integrity. What a very remarkable actress she is: quite the best, it seems to me, working in Hollywood.
All three characters are addicts. Paul is lost without his fags and hides them from his wife in the medicine cabinet. Jack has given up drinking with teeth-gritting determination and channels the subsequent pain and rage into righteous self-mortification. And Cristina is a semi-reformed cokehead, who we see at an NA meeting. For each, recovery is the nearest thing to a clear spiritual purpose they have, and in a 21st-century society in which there is said to be a god-shaped hole, the language of addiction and recovery plugs the gap as much as possible, but the chill wind of loneliness still howls through.
And when they are struck by tragedy, what do these people have to fall back upon? What new meaning can they construct for themselves among the rubble? "Life does not just 'go on'," says Cristina coldly to her sorrowing father, raising the question of whether life really "went on" when everything was supposedly just fine. The story that emerges disturbingly shows these three people coming to pieces and wondering - like us - who they are.
This is an arresting and accomplished film with an Ancient Mariner ability to fix a pincer-like grip on your attention. The final voiceover, in which the mystery of the title is revealed, resolves perhaps too easily its dissonant music into a euphonious clinch, and might even borrow unconsciously from Sam Mendes's American Beauty, a movie whose price in the reputation stock-market is bearish. But 21 Grams is just so distinctive: fluid, exhilarating, virtuoso cinema.
