Busy Being Born,
Busy Dying
by Sasha Stone

What is the value, the weight of a human soul? This is the question Alejandro González Iñárritu asks us to ponder in his latest film, 21 Grams. Here, life's key moments are as bright and definitive as primary colors. We are born, we live and we die. In between, however, what gets mixed together to paint us as individuals is a different matter entirely.

This is probably one of the harder films to sit through of any released this year. It tugs and tears at your heart, like other mournful, ponderous works, such as Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter or Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas. Revisiting life's horrors on screen is challenging, to say the least. Challenging, but worthwhile.

Here is a film where lives intersect in a way that will prove what is, ultimately, the unavoidable truth: that we do not exist in vacuum. What we do, intentionally or not, affects others. When bad things inadvertently happen to those we love, we must accept that we have absolutely no control over the movement of life. Sometimes, the hardest things to bear are accidents. We lead our lives haphazardly, randomly and only later do we reflect upon what we might have done differently to influence the events that followed.

21 Grams is a jigsaw puzzle of moments in the lives of three pockets of people - we see the end before the beginning and a lot of confusing scenes out of order, but eventually the puzzle begins to take shape and the story is fleshed out in agonizing detail.

Naomi Watts plays Christina, an unsuspecting mother whose children and husband are killed by a driver one normal afternoon. In an instant, three lives are directly affected by the accident. Sean Penn plays Paul, a patient waiting in the hospital for a heart transplant, who is the beneficiary of Christina's husband's death. Finally, Benicio Del Toro plays Jack, the driver, a born again ex-con who believes fervently that "God knows when a single hair moves on your head."

In an instant, Paul is given a second chance at life. And with his new heart, his life can't go on the way it was going. He is compelled to seek out the man whose heart he inherited. This journey leads him to Christina, who by now, awash in the kind of unimaginable misery everyone dreads, is back to her old days of drugs and drinking. Eventually, their paths will intersect with Jack's - we know this because it's one of the first scenes in the film. We know what the outcome will be; we just don't know what happens to get them there.

A bit like life, don't you think? We all know eventually we're going to die. We know what our beginning was and what our end will be. But the story is unwritten. At one point, Paul is told that there are no guarantees he'll live with his new heart in the outside world but that, at least, if he stays in the hospital he can "die better." Really, that's all one can really, ultimately hope for in this bleak path to the afterlife we're on - that somehow, some way we'll die better.

It's the writing here that is truly breathtaking. Guillermo Arriaga's screenplay dives right underneath the plot and gnaws at the bone marrow of human existence. When Christina finally weeps for her daughter she bemoans that her daughter died with red shoe laces on. "She hated red shoe laces." And because Christina had never gotten around to buying her different ones, this detail sticks out most in her mind - her daughter had to die with those awful shoe laces on. It cleaves a mother in two, thoughts like that - the needling details in life that reduce us to puddles of tears.

The brilliant screenplay is upstaged slightly by the acting. Two of the world's best, Del Toro and Penn, give some of their best work here and Watts, despite having a slightly one-note part, is great at appearing twisted up in grief. And then there's Iñárritu's direction, which brilliantly pieces together an odd, unsettling study of the broad strokes of misery we all must grapple with.

The film is, along with two others this year (Lost in Translation and Mystic River) at its very best in its last five minutes, when the voice-over asks us to ponder the weight of the soul, the weight of a life. When a body dies, it immediately loses 21 grams - no one knows what that is exactly - only that it doesn't weigh very much, a small stack of nickels. It is nothing and it is everything. In the end, what really matters to us, is whom we hold dear. It is as simple and as horrifying as that.

©2003 Sasha Stone
CineScene