"21 Grams" is gripping, yet lacks deeper meaning

In his follow up to the critically acclaimed "Amores Perros," director Alejandro Iñárritu has produced an emotionally powerful and gripping film; however, this is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of "21 Grams" featuring an all-star cast of Sean Penn ("Mystic River" and "Dead Man Walking"), Benicio Del Toro ("Traffic" and "The Usual Suspects"), and Naomi Watts ("The Ring" and "Mulholland Drive").

At a college press conference in New York City, Iñárritu emphasized that the film is an emotional not intellectual journey. This is where, despite all the sound and fury that holds the audience's attention, jumping back and forth through time like God on speed, "21 Grams" fails to have much more significance than its title suggests.

Guillermo Arriaga, the film's screenwriter, brilliantly exploits the full measure of his artistic creativity in "21 Grams" construct a plot that, while shot in chronological order, plays far better in the chronological patchwork than it every would have running ploddingly along in time.

The story, whose intrigues lie not in the ending but in the intermediate details we are filled in on along the way, chronicles the lives of three disparate individuals tied together by their common suffering and mysterious histories.

Watts plays Cristina Peck, a drug addict turned suburban housewife struggling with the death of her husband and children, a struggle so intense that Watts spent weeks attending grief support sessions with mothers in similar situations in order to be able to, as Penn put it at the college press conference, "summon the inquisition every day on the set."

Penn portrays an emotionally and medically troubled mathematics professor Paul Rivers, struggling for normality after losing his heart to cancer and to a breakup with his wife Mary. Del Toro portrays Jack Jordan, a harshly religious ex-convict, struggling with his past, conscience and inner demons.

The film's great strengths are in its production values. Del Toro's heart-stopping performance moves us to deep sympathy with his violent, conflicted and ultimately penitential character. During the conference, Del Toro remarked of the difficulty of portraying emotional pain, but this is a difficulty that he has clearly overcome.

Penn's performance is equally impressive, as he takes on an enormous emotional and character range that dazzle the audience and draw us into Paul's psychology, one that Penn said he lived in order to portray the role. Watts, while also strong, left something to be desired; her anguish is palpable, but overdone and too undiversified; in sharp contrast to Penn, we get the feeling that she is stuck in a rut of depression, unable to show the true diversity of Cristina's emotions.

Most powerful is the masterful construction orchestrated by Iñárritu and Arriaga that has the story dancing through time in the proud tradition of "Memento". Almost playfully enthralling, "21 Grams" hold our attention through every scene where a less careful film would easily have lost us with such callous disregard for chronology.

The Mexican duo keep us anticipating the seemingly oxymoronic surprise middle that reminds us of the true satisfaction of a good plot: not a jarring ending, but a satisfying, comprehensible, and nuanced plot that fits together to narrate a journey of characters and conflicts.

However the filmmakers sought to do more than entertain and enthrall; Arriaga emphasized his desire to inspire reflection and though about the value of life, the meaning of death, and loose threads that forever interweave lives. Yet here, the film largely fails. The plot, while creatively interspersed in time, lacks the coherence and internal consistency that a film with such lofty aspirations should have.

Messages about religion in life are lost in a conflict between Arriaga's atheism and Iñárritu's Catholicism. The cinematography is over-realistic to the point of being pretentiously and self-indulgently unpleasant.

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Most disappointing of all, there seems to be no good reason for the film's chorological format other than sheer exploitative gimmickry: unable to build a plot that itself would intrigue engage the audience, the filmmakers resorted to the latest trick in the book to keep the audience on its feet.

All these flaws mean that, as entertaining as the film is, it fails to achieve its aspiration to answering what the weight of a human life is, other than the myth of the body losing 21 grams at the moment of death.

Despite its flaws, "21 Grams" will certainly make for a gripping two hours. Even without much deeper meaning, the emotional rollercoaster the film takes the audience through, if a bit exploitative, is invigorating and maybe even though-provoking. One is left to hope that this limited release film finds its way to a theatre nearer than New York, where I had to venture for a sneak preview, to the Old Nassau.