Wired Mesh

Darkness Falls, Bad Things Happen

I was on hold with the County Clerk's office a few minutes ago, listening to muzak through the phone receiver, when I realized that what my life is missing is a Lionel Richie album. I have no idea which one to buy, but it definitely needs to include that fine ballad Hello. I distinctly remember listening to that song around age five, when my parents would let me fall asleep to an easy listening radio station.

But enough with the childhood melancholy. I've been doing a poor job of posting my latest film reviews a week after they run in the Pulse, so today I'm going to post a couple. Here's my review of 21 Grams, which is probably playing in all of eight theaters these days. Punctuality is not my best virtue. (I'll take perfect attendence, Mr. Blume.)

Eventually I'll take the advice of Isaac Wardell's dad and just create a separate category for these articles. But not today. Today I'm trying to transfer the title on the Big Purple Van O'Love, and get some insurance. And I'm on hold a lot. Which brings us back to the Lionel Richie songs.

Anyway, here's that review:

21 Grams matches fine performances to a silly story

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the March 3-9 issue of the Pulse

The entire country is abuzz with debate over Mel Gibson’s violent Jesus movie, The Passion of the Christ. But if you find that a Bijou showing of The Passion is sold out, as most of them are, let me suggest that 21 Grams will make a tolerable substitute. Both movies focus unflinchingly on suffering, ponder the providence of God, and end with death and a resurrection of sorts. But perhaps Gibson could take a few directing tips from 21 Grams director Alejandro Gonzalez Ińarritu. I suspect that many viewers will find themselves more moved by 21 Grams than The Passion, mainly because Inarritu gently maneuvers the audience’s emotions, instead of assaulting them.

This is particularly evident in the film’s central sequence, a horrific car wreck that transforms the lives of the main characters. Ińarritu shows us the crash’s victims, a few moments before the accident, chatting with a neighbor blowing leaves from his yard. The victims wander away, happily unaware of their fate, but the camera stays trained on the boy with his leaf blower. We see a truck drive by, hear a distant thud, and the boy drops his tool and runs toward the unseen wreck. All that we see is the leaf blower and the porches of houses, nestled peacefully in the twilight. There’s not a drop of blood onscreen, but the sadness is agonizing.

Ińarritu is clearly gifted at evoking emotions from small, subtle moments. And he has a masterful cast to work with here: Sean Penn is a mathematics professor hoping for a heart transplant, Naomi Watts is mother struggling with cocaine addiction, and Benecio Del Toro is an ex-convict who has found solace in a particularly fundamentalist sect of Christianity. All three of these characters have systems of belief that they use to explain and order their lives, but the car wreck brings them together even as it tears their worldviews apart. The three actors – especially Penn – are fantastic at creating characters who are falling to pieces, and Ińarritu gets the small details of their lives right, down the desperate joyfulness of a Pentecostal church service.

Unfortunately, both the directors and the actors are stuck creating authentic moments in the midst of a story that is really, really stupid. I shouldn’t write too much about this: the movie isn’t structured chronologically, so most of the plot is meant to be discovered slowly. But I will note that the movie’s central conceit is ripped off from the Minnie Driver comedy Return to Me, and maybe it worked better in that movie. In 21 Grams, the script by Guillermo Arriaga feels like an undergraduate’s philosophy thesis: clever, but completely implausible.

What lingers after watching 21 Grams is the sense that movies are straining harder and harder for serious, solemn topics, and in the process squeezing a lot of the fun out of moviegoing. This winter has given us a long line of movies fascinated by the far limits of misery: in the last month alone, I’ve seen Monster, House of Sand and Fog, The Passion of the Christ and now 21 Grams. Some of these movies are masterpieces, some are pretty terrible, and 21 Grams is somewhere in the middle. But each one feels like an attempt to top the others in how brutally it portrays human existence. It’s enough to make a guy nostalgic for some mindless comic book adaptations.

Posted by mesh at March 24, 2004 02:57 PM | TrackBack