21 Grams | By David Levinson

BRANDISHING THAT big ol' hand-of-God sense of fatalism, Alejandro González Iñárritu sets out to consider Paul River's (Sean Penn) point that "How two people meet is a mystery bigger than us". Conflating glorified soap opera material with grim, ashen realism, 21 Grams, much like Irréversible, is a film that takes a simple narrative, disrupts it, and then wraps it around a philosophical conceit. Only, instead of wrenching his characters through agony to get to bliss, Iñárritu's shambled chronology – which merges the past, present and future – weaves them about a harmonic apex of life and death that finds itself falling in and out of balance as the core tragedy unfolds.


As with Amores Perros, it's a car crash that acts as the narrative intersection here, and in examining the web of events that form around it, Iñárritu's handle of structure is remarkable. Leaping from before to after and back again, characters are smashed together from moments that find them in a flurry of (physical and emotional) states. And as we're essentially stripped of 'memory', at least until the narrative starts to spiral inwards, it's impossible to connect pain and pleasure to anything outside of the direct moment. Ostensibly, the whole thing smacks of a butterfly-flapping-its-wings intricacy, but once you realise how broad the arcs of connection actually are, it becomes more a case of small-moments-amidst-grand-tragedy.

At least Iñárritu is willing to aggravate fate – particularly as a religious concept – by making it something more internal than external. Conferring with a priest, after having killed the husband and two daughters of Cristina Peck (Naomi Watts), Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro) points towards his temple, saying that "this is hell". Namely, what use is the promise of redemption when you can't ever erase the actual experience? And when you consider that that's all we really are – an accumulation of our experiences – individual action becomes something shaped not so much by others, as it is by the burden of the past. Hence, characters are caught in a violent push-and-pull dynamic of constantly trying to get away from themselves and failing. All it really comes down to is drug-of-choice: Jack Jordan fills the void with Jesus, where as mathematician Paul Rivers can't quite suppress his taste for infidelity, despite having been giving a second chance via a heart transplant. Cristina tries to internalise the pain of loss, berating her father over how easily he got over the death of her mother. Yet, she falls too, landing in a deluge of hallucinogenics and sex. And just as a sudden desire for revenge comes fueled by a sick sense of desperation, the film takes a turn about its cosmic axis, with the intimation of a healing process finally setting in. Life bursts forth from death, and now, having had to build up some tenuous resemblance of normality and watch it collapse, it's just a case of picking up the pieces and trying again.