21 Grams DVD > Reviews > The Weight of Your Soul

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Liked it
Story	Good
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Standard
How does it compare to similar films?	Good

Advantages:	Innovative, intriguing film style
Disadvantages:	Potentially confusing

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

They say that we all lose exactly 21 grams in weight at the exact moment of our death.

Cristina Peck is a beautiful young woman who shares a beautiful home with her husband and two young daughters. With no need to work, she passes her time at the local swimming baths where she keeps fit and socialises with her friends. Returning home one day, she receives a telephone message from her husband to say that he is on his way and she laughs to herself as she hears the two girls giggling and playing around in the background. Ten minutes later, the phone rings again.

Jack Jordan is a petty criminal who, having served various jail sentences, is trying to go straight once and for all. He has now found faith and devotes much of his life to the local church, where he tries to encourage impressionable teenagers not to get themselves into trouble. He lives with his wife and two children in a modest house, earning a basic living as a golf caddy. When the manager of the golf club receives complaints about Jordan’s appearance, he is forced to sack the poor man, but he believes that he may be able to find an alternative position for him through a friend of a friend.

Paul Rivers is a university lecturer who suffers from a deteriorating heart condition and lives with his young, English wife. As his health denigrates, the couple becomes increasingly desperate that they will be unable to find a suitable organ donor. His wife wants nothing more than to have a child and so, without Paul’s knowledge, she seeks medical advice. As a result of an earlier abortion, there is some damage to the woman’s reproductive organs and it is suggested that the couple’s only hope of a child lies with artificial insemination. Despite his obvious distress that he is unlikely ever to see the child born, Paul signs the consent forms and the couple goes ahead with the procedure.

Three different people living three different lives, but fate conspires to bring them all together. United in tragedy and grief, 21 Grams is the story of how life goes on, whether we like it or not.

In the style of Memento, 21 Grams is as convoluted as it is utterly simple. Filmed in a grainy, grimy style with raw documentary-style footage, it barely feels like a work of fiction and it doesn’t really play like one either. The obvious comparison is to the thriller Memento, which is a story about a guy who suffers from memory loss and can only remember things in short chunks. In support of this, the story is told in reverse, literally in chunks or acts that demonstrate how the clues are pieced together. 21 Grams works slightly differently, in that the film basically moves forward, but each of the strands of the story are also cut into chunks and interspersed with one another. So one scene will show an event that happens some time after the next scene, which is set some time before the last scene. If that sounds confusing, then by definition it probably is, but if you actually sit through the film you’ll find that it does make sense.

Initially, of course, it’s all utterly dumbfounding. One minute a character is singing in church, in the next scene he’s shown lifting his things onto a prison bunk bed. This is, of course, entirely deliberate and is there to make the audience question everything. It is the much more satisfying when one scene starts to explain another, which in turn explains the one before and so on. It certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea though. After thirty minutes in the cinema, I noticed several people abandoning hope and leaving the auditorium.

21 Grams is quite a harrowing film, because there are no fluffy edges to the thing. The story is born of tragedy and as the story unfolds we simply see how this affects the three main characters and their families. The film looks at many different things and I suspect that different viewers will take different things away from it. For me, the film was about loss and how people deal with it. Each of the three main characters deals with their loss in a very different way but the film also tries to demonstrate how loss nearly always leads to some gain. I suppose it’s one of those “something good comes of something bad” type stories, although it focuses rather more on the something bad than the something good.

The whole style and tone of the film is quite unusual. In many scenes, there is a real absence of colour, as though it has been drained from the world by the very events depicted. It’s quite an arty movie, with brief moments of imagery and a general subtlety that sets it out from any mainstream movie. At over two hours in running time, it is also quite heavy going, but despite criticisms from some reviewers, I never felt that the time was wasted or gratuitous. 21 Grams was a careful, considered piece of story telling and as such, it needed to take its time. The 15 certificate reflects some sexual/violent content, although nothing extreme or particularly disturbing. The film was directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, a relative newcomer to the proceedings but a name that I suspect we will be hearing a lot more of.

The film is helped enormously by a strong performance from all the lead cast members. Naomi Watts is absolutely outstanding as Cristina Peck, and engages the audience as soon as she appears. As the troubled ex-con, Benicio Del Toro is characteristically moody and troubled and whilst he does have a huge amount of dialogue in the film he is also highly believable. Sean Penn fares well in this too, with a rather more under-stated portrayal of Paul Rivers that does seem quite so forced as some of his other turns.

21 Grams is an unusual, intense, awkward film. Despite its mainstream success, it is low on effects, action and convention, but this just makes it all the more attractive. If you’re tired of big-budget, lacklustre Hollywood blockbusters, then you really ought to try this. And if you’re not, well, you really ought to try this anyway.

Recommended