21 Grams
Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu

Emilie Bickerton

They say, 'life goes on', even after a tragedy. But how? And where does it go on to? Spurning a chronological narrative, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's new film presents the human condition through a tale of zigzags and cruel miracles.

'What is love?' Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu asked in his first feature film, Amores Perros (2000). And now, 'How much is life worth?' Is it possible to give an objective measurement to such an ephemeral thing as the human soul? 'They say a body always loses exactly 21 grams at the moment of death.' Could it be that in a simple number is contained something as precious as life?

Gonzáles Iñárritu is a director who likes to frame his work in grand themes, with bold questions promising a meditation on nothing less than the human condition. His structure, however, appears to betray the ambition. The fragmented narrative presents a picture of lives endlessly splintering away from any kind of linear progress - the concatenation of scenes is not held together by conventional chronology, but byemotions: the viewer is witness to a developing mosaïc of images and impressions, revealing each character as essentially multi-dimensional.

As though to prove that there exist universal emotions and themes, Gonzáles Iñárritu, a Mexican director, re-located in the US following the international success of Amores Perros, and was financed entirely by Universal's arthouse division, Focus Features. He is explicitly opposed to nationalist cinema, to the notion of distinctive voices from particular places, and in his use of North American locations, actors and language, escapes any analysis that may frame him in the context of a recent resurgence in Latin American film, or a product of Mexico's cinema schools. Though the film was initially written in Spanish, and set in Mexico city, it is true that the peculiarities of language and culture are of little significance for his chosen themes: dialogue and events are never jarred, nor are there ever any distinctive cultural traits about people or actions.

There are parallels between Gonzáles Iñárritu's two films, though there are few similarities beyond a fondness in more demanding storytelling and editing techniques. 21 Grams does have a tripartite narrative, but this time the three characters interact frequently and eventually mould each other's lives more actively. Once again it is a car crash that brings these disparate individuals together: the mother and wife of the crash victims, recovering drug addict Christina (Naomi Watts); the perpetrator Jack (Benico del Toro), a reformed criminal and born-again Christian; and finally invalid mathematics professor Paul (Sean Penn), who receives Christina's dead husband's heart. Each is forced to deal with the burden of death, in life.

Gonzáles Iñárritu resurrects a quaint but scientifically redundant story about the American scientist Duncan MacDougall, who set out in 1907 to weigh the human soul by converting a hospital bed into a rudimentary balance which would allow him to compare the bodyweight of patients before and after death. From his experiments he postulated that the weight a body loses at the moment of death is always 21 grams.

This is re-articulated through the mathematician, Paul, though his interest is more to do with how incommensurate the two seem to be, 'the weight of five nickels, of a hummingbird, of a chocolate bar...'. These three objects have nothing in common but their weight.

Gonzáles Iñárritu suggests that human lives are interwoven by equally arbitrary factors. The chance events in life - the meeting of a lover, an accident or car crash - are miraculously, or horribly, disproportionate to their transformative effects. 'The Earth turned to bring us closer/ It spun on itself and within us… Nights passed by, snowfalls and solistices; time passed in minutes and millennia…' Do we call it serendipity ? Coincidence? Acts of God? None provides explanation. Gonzáles Iñárritu's fixation on these events indicates a certain wonder in, and willingness to succumb to, the unexpected - a mockery of those who try to plan, who have objectives. Determining life is not human subjectivity he is saying, but what Stanislaw Lem has called, 'cruel miracles'.

Conventional chronology is made subservient to the emotions (time passed in minutes and millennia), and the meditation on grief, loss and life through the fragmented narrative has its virtues. Events don't develop, but rather erupt, and consequently the notion of salvation seems always reversible, the treachery of addiction pervasive and the grieving process horribly enduring.

To think that we never question our decisions, go back on them even, that we are never tempted to regress, that we always get over things, even tragic loss, is folly (or maybe the stuff of movies?). As the film nears a close we see Christina make a terrible pilgrimage to the scene of the accident, treading over the footsteps of her disappeared, and crumbling eventually under the abominable weight of her imagination. This probably happened soon after the funeral, shown to us much earlier, and the return seems initially repetitive - but the repetition is a conscious rejection of any attempt to portray 'Christina getting over it', and points directly to the very human truth that grief has stamina.

For all of its bold questions, however, one can't escape the feeling that 21 Grams is essentially a melodrama, or a very stylised telenovela - something its masterly editing allows you to forget. The film is oddly unthinking. You work hard to make sense of the stories at first, captivated simply by the jumbled mystery of characters and events. But as the worlds begin to unravel your interest is sustained by little more than an unhealthy interest in other people's lives, how these characters (flawed and formidable) deal with tragedy.

Despite Gonzáles Iñárritu's pretensions, the film lacks broader ideas to wrestle with, and at no point are you asked to reflect. The fragmented structure is also a forgiving format for some contrived voiceovers, and what at first seemed to be a bold choice of direction, moving away from a diachronic narrative, eventually concludes in directorial cowardice. Gonzáles Iñárritu seems to have a poor opinion of his audience, or fears charges of obliqueness: the final scenes overcompensate for the initial challenges.

In case the structure was too demanding there is a closing flurry of petrified explanation, with slow-motion incorporated to show exactly who did what to whom and how. A slightly irritating denoument, providing answers on the level of the telenovela, rather than the human condition.