OK, I promised. I’ll deliver.
A great director once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “All I’ve ever done is re-make the same film over and over.” I can’t remember who the director was, and I can’t look it up because all my film books are back in England. But trust me on this one. He was a director, and he said something similar to the words above.
This stunningly badly-remembered passage can be very appropriately applied to the career arc of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu. His latest film glides into the showroom very much like a mk. II Amores Perros. It’s more refined, shorter, more disciplined, lingers longer and strikes deeper than his much-lauded debut feature.
21 Grams is set in the US. (As an aside, I hope that this doesn’t mean that Hollywood has already devoured the main practitioners behind the Mexican new wave and that Innaritu will follow a similar path to his compatriot Alfonso Cauron, who has so far managed to dodge back and forth between Hollywood and his indigenous cinema with Great Expectations, Y Tu Mama Tambien and the imminent third installment of the Harry Potter series.) It employs a similar disjointed narrative technique to Amores Perros as we skip backwards and forwards through time catching glimpses of the principal three characters’ stories. Early on we see blood, we see the angry and wounded faces of the leads, played by Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, and we wonder what twists of fate could conspire to bring them here. 21 Grams is essentially a puzzle, a puzzle with a strong symmetry and, thankfully, a puzzle that solves itself before our eyes.
Late in the film, Benicio Del Toro’s character, Jack Jordan, is drunkenly staring at a cheap print of a tiger on the wall of his flyblown motel room. It is a brief moment which conjures up the lines:
21 Grams is essentially a fatalistic film. The characters are locked into this string of events, and this means that its gaze is dispassionate. Addiction, extreme religion, terminal illness, emotional breakdowns are all observed with the same cool eye. No judgments are cast because the fates of all the films protagonists are set. Is it right that Naomi Watts’ character uses cocaine to escape her pain? Is it right if Benicio Del Toro’s character’s parenting will bring up another man who makes the same mistakes? Is it right that Sean Penn’s character leaves his wife? In 21 Grams there is no right and wrong, only the fearful symmetry of fate.
