Enigma Variations
Sight & Sound
March 2004
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s new film ’21 Grams’ is more puzzling and powerful than ‘Amores Perros’. Jonathan Romney thinks its meditation on the soul’s fate takes the telenovela to a new level
Given that most film-makers live in fear of repeating themselves – or at least, of being seen to repeat themselves – the new film by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu represents a case of breathtaking insouciance. Gonzalez Inarritu’s debut feature Amores Perros (2000) was about three sets of unrelated characters whose lives are linked by a car accident. Its follow-up 21 Grams is also about three sets of unconnected characters whose lives are linked by a car accident. Both films even contain a scene in which a wounded character lies soaked in blood in the back of a speeding car. You might read this as thematic fixation on the part of Gonzalez Inarritu and his screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (who has indeed confessed to an obsession with car crashes). Alternatively, you could view it as an act of provocation – a reminder to the viewer that while 21 Grams bears thematic and structural similarities to its predecessor, it by no means offers the same material reshuffled, and is most certainly not Amores Perros: Made in USA.
Amores Perros not only made its director’s name, but also focused world attention on a newly re-energised Mexican cinema, a national PR coup consolidated the following year by Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien. With 21 Grams, Gonzalez Inarritu will firm up his international reputation; but this film, bankrolled by Universal’s arthouse division Focus Features, is North American, shot in English and featuring international stars (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro) with Hollywood kudos. Originally written in Spanish with a Mexico City setting, the film is now located in an unidentified US city (it was actually shot in Memphis and around Albuquerque). Yet it neither looks nor feels like a Hollywood film. It flouts mainstream narrative conventions in favour of an uncompromisingly demanding art-cinema approach, and visually and thematically it is a direct continuation of the explorations of Amores Perros. In fact, Gonzalez Inarritu has retained many members of that film’s production team – notably composer Gustavo Santaolalla, production designer Brigitte Broch and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, now a Hollywood name in his own right, having shot US films including Spike Lee’s 25th Hours, Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile and Oliver Stone’s Comandante. Despite its rather different look – predominantly faded colours as opposed to the hot saturation of Amores Perros – 21 Grams is very much of a piece with its predecessor, the continuity signalled largely by Prieto’s handheld camerawork and a grainily intense texture acquired by means of the bleach-bypass developing process.
While it shares the previous film’s triangular basis, 21 Grams is structurally far more complex – not a film in three parts so much as a film to the power of three. Amores Perros featured three stories, tenuously linked but otherwise autonomous, intersecting (quite literally) at the Mexico City crossroads where the car crash occurs. In 21 Grams everything comes back to the moment when Jack Jordan (Del Toro), a former convict who has now embraced Jesus with pathological fervour, accidentally runs down and kills Michael (Danny Huston) and his two young daughters in a suburban street. Surgeons use Michael’s heart to save the life of Paul (Penn), a mathematics professor whose own heart condition has seemingly sentenced him to imminent death. Fascinated to know whose organ has saved him, Paul shadows, then starts a relationship with, Michael’s widow Cristina (Watts), while his own relationship with his English wife Mary (an awkwardly cast Charlotte Gainsbourg) crumbles. The guilt-stricken Jack has a spell in prison, then walks out on his wife Marianne (Melissa Leo) and attempts to lose himself in the New Mexico desert, where Paul and Cristina track him down, having vowed to kill him.
All this is the ‘after’ of the catalytic event, but there is also a ‘before’: the characters’ troubled pasts, unseen but alluded to, which cast long shadows over their eventual fates. Jack, we learn, has a history not only of petty crime but of drink and drug abuse: finding religion, he goes teetotal. It is made clear that he declined the offer of a drink shortly before the accident; later, however the presence of a whisky bottle in his shabby New Mexico motel room reveals his backsliding. (The film relies as much on discreetly placed visual clues as on outright exposition.) Similarly Cristina’s past before her marriage was marked by drug abuse and promiscuity, while Paul’s marriage has just about survived his dalliances with his students.
Our ability to navigate this time scheme – the present and future which we see, the past we don’t – is challenged by the fragmented narrative structure devised by Gonzalez Inarritu, Arriaga and editor Stephen Mirrione. 21 Grams is a jigsaw film that requires its audience to take on an exceptional task of interpretation and imaginative ordering. The film is divided into a number of brief narrative sequences – between 90 and 100, by my rough estimate – that appear to be arranged at random. Gonzalez Inarritu has explained that “the principle was to be aware of the emotional order of the facts”, but it is not always obvious what considerations govern the transitions. Sometimes associative connections dominate: a scene in which a clergyman invokes Christ is followed by images of a bearded emaciated, barefoot Paul, himself resembling Jesus agonistes. Elsewhere juxtapositions seem motivated by colour contrasts: for instance, the shift from a predominantly red shot of Jack’s birthday party to the cool blue of a swimming-pool scene.
As the film shifts between its three strands, and a narrative order starts to emerge, we look more closely into the deep logic of the pattern and wonder which pieces of information Gonzalez Inarritu is most carefully withholding. Initially, however, the pressing questions is simply: what’s going on? For at least the first quarter of the film – by Gonzalez Inarritu’s reckoning, the narrative begins to gel at around 25 minutes – we work flat out to determine who the characters are, what their relationships are to each other, and what exactly is the order of events.
A brief run-through of just the film’s first five minutes shows how many enigmas are presented in quick succession. The opening shot, preceding the title, shows a couple in a bedroom, with sunlight pouring through the window. The woman is asleep, not yet recognisable for certain as Naomi Watts; the man is clearly Sean Penn, and his brooding as he smokes a cigarette marks him as something like the conscious centre of the story, the person who’s thinking it out, mapping events in his mind. We next see Michael and his daughters in a diner, then Cristina in a self-help group talking about how her husband straightened her out, then Jack, custodian of a church hall, lecturing a surly young man on the need to sort out his life. We then see an unshaven Penn lying in hospital, and hear his thoughts in voiceover. “What am I doing in this pre-corpse club?” he wonders. “I don’t know when anything began any more or when it’s going to end.”
That is our uncertainty exactly: is Paul on the verge of death before or after his bedroom moment with Cristina? If before, what saved him? If after, what took him to death’s door? A similar ambiguity reigns in the following shot of Cristina furtively sniffing coke in a dimly lit room: is this her rejected past, or a future lapse? Such simple questions of temporal orienteering give a specific thrust to the film’s metaphysical enquiry. For if we don’t know whether we are seeing characters saved or damned, then the film is haunted by a sense that redemption is unstable, sliding both ways. A person can be damned, then saved, then damned again; there may be no end to the circle, and as far as the narrative goes, we cannot event tell where in the circle we are.
The intense rush of narrative fragments may be hard going at first, but there is no shortage of navigational aids. We get little visual clues from the changes in the characters’ appearance: at different times Paul is clean-shaven or bearded, Jack wears his hair long or cropped, Cristina looks crisply turned out or wanly dishevelled. Also, certain repetitions crate a rhythmic scansion: in particular, the repetition of Michael’s phone message to Cristina, left immediately before the accident, becomes a rhythmic tolling, accumulating a weight of chilling inexorability as the film goes on. And there are verbal refrains: variations on the banal observation “life goes on” made ironically by Paul, earnestly by the father of the newly widowed Cristina and angrily by Marianne as she tries to badger Jack back into his family responsibilities.
As in Amores Perros, there are also key moments at which the seemingly parallel stories connect or glancingly touch. Just as Paul is receiving the dead Michael’s heart Mary stares at Cristina walking down a hospital corridor: one life reprieved as another ends. (These narrative ‘intersections’ are comparable to the frequently glimpsed billboard of model Valeria in Amores Perros, which helps stitch the three stories together). Santaolalla’s score also provides punctuation – brief, spare passages of guitar or bandoneon cueing us to take a mental breather before the next block of scenes.
As for the film’s central event, the crash itself is never seen, only signalled. The nearest we get to viewing it is in a scene that is a remarkable feat of indirection. Lucio, a young Latino gardener, is seen blowing leaves off a lawn, then talking with Michael, who stops and then walks on; as we hear a crash off-screen Lucio runs towards the incident; in long shot we see the empty lawn, the blower still full on. The event is unrepresentable, but its awful concreteness is underlined by the fact that we later learn exactly when it occurred – at 6.50p.m. on 10 October. It is hard not to see in this precise notation an echo of the cataclysm of 11 September 2001, an inescapable reference point in American dramas of bereavement made after that date. In fact, between his two features Gonzalez Inarritu filmed a brief piece for 11’09”01 (2002), the portmanteau film dedicated to commemorating that event (it largely comprises a black screen interrupted by split-second, near-subliminal inserts of footage showing a man leaping from the World Trade Center).
Without a doubt the structure of 21 Grams offers as extreme a fragmentation as we are ever likely to see in a mainstream drama, but the tactic has a distinguished lineage. It has literary precursors in the novels of William Faulkner, a particular hero of Arriaga’s, while among Latin American writers Gonzalez Inarritu has stated his interest in Argentinean Julio Cortazar, whose novel cum essay Rayuela (Hopscotch) offers the reader several possible reading orders including a purely aleatory one. In film the closest relations of 21 Grams include Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), which continually sets characters’ dysfunctional present lives against their seemingly balanced pasts. Similar challenges to the viewer’s cognitive skills are made by the more linear (that is, backwards-linear) Memento (2000); you can imagine that, like Christopher Nolan’s film, 21 Grams could be issued as a DVD that allowed pedantic viewers the opportunity to reprogramme events chronologically. But perhaps the most radically jigsaw-like fictions, in terms of their stress on discontinuity and the impossibility of a ‘correct’ overview, are Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance (1995) and Code Unknown (2000), which shuffle events into a sort of continuous present tense.
Hardcore devotees of modernist fragmentation might cavil that 21 Grams is not as norm-challenging as it first appears, since there clearly is a single ‘correct’ order of events to be reconstructed. Some critics have complained (e.g. Alissa Quart in Film Comment) that despite its surface experimentation, 21 Grams is at heart simply a melodrama. Indeed, its story is very much the stuff of Latin American telenovelas, both in the amplified emotions its actors invoke and in the ironic coincidences put into play. One man’s death is the saving of another, who then falls in love with the first man’s wife; that woman, giving blood to save her dying lover, discovers she is pregnant. If it weren’t for the structure, we could almost be watching a Latin American soap, perhaps entitles But Life Goes On…
It is true that the diffusing effect of the structure allows Gonzalez Inarritu to mitigate certain emotional gestures that might seem excessive if presented within a more linear format. In particular, Del Toro’s glassy-eyed religious ranting, especially in his prison scenes, risks looking downright febrile at times, and the moments where Watts’s Cristina explodes at Paul crank up the emotional register to an unapologetic maximum. Surprisingly, it is Penn – hardly known for his underplaying – who proves the most controlled of the trio, his reserved, even cautious facial signals especially telling in those scenes where he makes tentative circles of approach around Cristina.
Perhaps because 21 Grams necessarily proceeds elliptically, there are moments when the film seems to compensate by telling us too much: specifically, telling us exactly what the film is about. Paul is the conduit for this over-explicitness, notably in his voiceover internal monologues on mortality. At the end of the film, with his imminent death now a certainty, he muses: “They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death… The weight of a stack of nickels. The weights of a chocolate bar. The weight of a hummingbird.” This apocryphal lore – one spiritual step away from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! – may provide the final piece of the puzzle by explaining the film’s title, but it also concludes things on an uncomfortably tendentious note. Presumably we must read this mysteriously vaporous commodity as nothing less than the human soul.
Yet the film asks more suggestive questions about identity – in a strictly material sense – than about the soul per se. These questions deal with where human identity resides and how we perceive it; whether identity is not as exchangeable as organs. Transplanted with Michael’s heart, Paul ponders, “I want to know who I am now.” When Marianne urges Jack to come home and be his old self again, the man he was before he discovered religion, he objects, “I was a fuckin’ pig before.” “At least it was you.” She retorts.
But we never really know who any of these people are, which makes for one of the film’s provocative pleasures. All these characters are searching for stability, yet the atomised narrative means that they are not only different people at different periods of their lives, but effectively different people from shot to shot; our perception of them is all that binds them into integrated beings. Theologically, that binding function might belong to the 21 Grams of whatever spiritual glue supposedly makes a person; in terms of what we see, nothing holds together the multiple shards of these characters’ plural selves except the synthesising capacities of the viewer’s own perception.
Where perception and the metaphysical come together is in the film’s repeated image of a flock of birds swooping in and out of formation over a city skyline. This is the very figure of the film’s challenge to us: to be at once aware of the multiplicity of disparate parts and of the elusive, shifting shape of the whole. Jack preaches to his young, reluctant disciple at the church: “God even know when a single hair moves on your head.” The extraordinary imaginative challenge to the viewer of 21 Grams is to be aware of all the single hairs and thereby to intuit the shape of the whole head. It’s a film in other words, that invites us to adopt a kind of divine perspective on the world.
* * *
Interview – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Emotional order
Jonathan Romney: The film’s structure is challenging in a way rarely seen in mainstream narrative cinema. Would you call ‘21 Grams’ an experimental film?
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: It’s an experimental structure which in the end is a very simple one. It try to establish a code of language and once people get the code –at minute 25, or something like it – everything comes together. Then there’s no problem if I jump around because people understand the rules of the game. In the end people have an emotional ride, without being interrupted by this apparently intellectual game. But I wanted every little piece of those first 25 minutes to be interesting in itself – to be a piece with a beginning, a middle and an end.
JR: Paul’s talk about the place of mathematics in life, the beauty of fractals and so forth, suggests you might be following some mathematical principle of your own.
AGI: The principle was to be aware of the emotional order of the facts. The order in which the scenes are presented is subservient to that.
JR: In those first 25 minutes we can’t easily place events. We can’t tell whether Cristina turns to drugs after her loss or whether we’re getting a glimpse of her former life. This suggests that salvation is always reversible.
AGI: These people were in hell before with their additions, then they reached a kind of balance, and then they get sent back to hell and try to survive and get back to a balance, or to heaven or whatever. There’s no happy ending because it’s a continuous process of fighting, different stages every day.
JR: Other fragmented narratives come to mind – in particular, Michael Haneke’s films.
AGI: I’ve seen Code Unknown, which is fascinating. That was a big inspiration for me. What I love is the way Haneke frees himself from any academic way of telling a story. That gave me courage, because it’s a big risk to assume people will understand.
JR: How do you and Guillermo Arriaga work together?
AGI: This time we had more intense problems with the script. Usually he sends me things, I read them, I give my comments, I ask about what I don’t understand, and then we discuss it. This time we had crises but it was very productive. I tried sending the script to three or four people I really respect – Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Cuaron, some Mexican directors – and they gave me their questions. That really helped us.
JR: Arriaga also has a credit as associate producer. What exactly was his role?
AGI: I gave him the credit because he shared the risk. I didn’t want to go through the development process with a studio, I wanted to be completely independent. Writing it, we thought it would probably never happen, and he didn’t receive any money in advance.
JR: Rodrigo Prieto is a specialist in creating the look of specific cities. This film reminded me of the look of the rundown Detroit in ‘8 Mile’.
AGI: It’s the same technique as in Amores Perros – the bleach bypass is the same. What’s different is the production design and shooting in a different light – the light of Memphis and Albuquerque is very different from Mexico City, as are the textures of the buildings. Here we made some use of digital correction, to get the eyes more illuminated or if the shadows weren’t very strong. Or to get that dark hour in the scene where the kids and the father are walking.
JR: How much does the film reflect your own religious beliefs?
AGI: I believe in God, and Guillermo is not a believer. I don’t think it’s a spiritual or a religious film and I’ll never be tempted to send a religious message. It’s a film about primitive instincts, human flesh-and-bone things – all the things that happen to these guys are day-to-day. I think the film raises some transcendental questions, but what the story’s really about is people like you and me.
JR: Did your short film for the “11’09”01’ portmanteau feed into this one in any way?
AGI: No. The short was video art, an exercise to clean myself of my fear and the pain I felt for the 3,000 people who died. I didn’t want to reduce that thing to a political statement, I just wanted to ask the big question: Does God blind us or guide us? For me that man jumping represents human beings falling apart, like Icarus trying to reach the sun – humanity falling down devastated. I used that image very subtly – less than a second, three times. I’m not using it in an exploitative way.
JR: ‘Amores Perros’ helped make Mexican cinema internationally prominent. How did people in Mexico feel about you making your next film in the US?
AGI: There will always be people who try to reduce art to a cheap patriotism thing – art will never exist if we think in our little narrow frontiers. Now people understand that by doing the film in English I could get the actors I got. That was a big reason. I would like to shoot in Mexico next. Guillermo and I are working on a possible final film for a triptych of triptychs.
* * *
Sight & Sound 21 Grams review
by Paul Julian Smith
An unnamed town in the US, the present. College professor Paul is awaiting a heart transplant. His English wife Mary is hoping to get pregnant through artificial insemination. Middle class housewife Cristina comes home to find her husband Michael and two young daughters have not yet arrived. Reformed jailbird Jack lives in poverty with his wife Marianne and two children and is obsessed with religion. Jumping backwards and forwards in time, the film recounts the consequences of a traffic accident in which Jack runs over and kills Cristina’s husband and daughters.
Paul is given Michael’s heart, Cristina spirals into despair and drug abuse and Jack, overcome with remorse, gives himself up to the police. Paul finds out who is donor was and, breaking up with Mary, begins an affair with Cristina. He also discovers that his new heart is being rejected. Cristina tells Paul that they owe it to Michael to kill Jack. When Jack is released from prison he remains tortured by guilt and leaves his family to stay in a motel. Paul and Cristina follow Jack, but Paul is unable to kill him. When Jack breaks into their motel room, Cristina attacks him, but Paul’s heart gives out and he shoots himself in the chest. They rush together to the hospital, where Cristina learns she is pregnant.
A.O. Scott of the New York Times recently wrote that when he sees a film at a press screening he tries to look at it twice: once as a filmgoer who simply experiences the film and once as a critic, reflecting self-consciously on that immediate experience. There can be few films that demand this double vision so much as 21 Grams, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s hugely ambitious drama in which the lives of a professor dying of heart disease (Sean Penn’s Paul), a young suburban mother (Naomi Watts’ Cristina), and an ex-con who has found Jesus (Benicio Del Toro’s Jack) intersect after a tragic accident. In one of the opening fragments, Jack shows an apprentice hoodlum how a life can fall apart by having him remove a piece from a precarious pile of wooden blocks. The pieces cascade down. Testing formal fragmentation to the limit, Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga risk just this kind of collapse in the first half hours where there seems no way of holding the pieces of the film (of three lives) together. But they offer another teasing analogy: Paul plays electronic chess in his hospital bed. As spectators we are required to participate in 21 Grams’ very serious game, facing the challenge that the film-makers have made to the audience as well as to the characters.
For lovers of Gonzalez Inarritu’s magnificent first feature, 21 Grams might seem at first sight to be Amores Perros times two, and not just in its premise of three lives linked and separated by a car crash. Breaking for the border, Gonzalez Inarritu brings his creative team from Mexico, but each of their contributions is intensified. While in Arriaga’s earlier script the three strands were developed separately and rarely intersected, here they are crosscut kaleidoscopically from the start. Rodrigo Prieto’s handheld cinematography was nervous and edgy in Amores Perros. Here it is positively vertiginous, swinging between the distraught actors for much of the picture. And the grainy, degraded texture of the image, varying with the use of different film stocks, is more emphatic than before. Even Brigitte Broch’s production design seems intensified. She has said that parts of the set which will never be seen (such as drawers which will not be opened) are dressed as diligently as those that are in sight. And there is a dense authenticity to these natural locations: sterile suburbs, raucous singles bars, grungy motels and hell-hole prisons. Shot in anonymous Memphis, a city whose stubby downtown towers few viewers are likely to recognise, and in the scrubby featureless New Mexican desert, 21 rams is convincing both as a mid-American document and as the universal moral drama that it aims to be.
This curious combination of veracity and abstraction holds for the characters too. It comes as something of a shock to learn that Penn’s gravely stoic Paul is a mathematics professor: we know nothing and care less for his professional background. The pressnotes tells us that Watts’ Cristina, who switches from one scene to the next between squeaky clean suburban mum and dirty blonde drug-addled wreck, had substance abuse problems before her marriage. I had assumed she began to take drugs only after the accident. Only Del Toro’s alarmingly thick-set Jack is provided with a fully fledged backstory: after a life devoted to booze and crime he has embraced religion with alarming ferocity. As his wife (the excellent Melissa Leo) confesses, she no longer knows who he is.
In spite, then, of these virtuoso performances, the focus of the film is more on abstract issues. 21 Grams tackles huge, unfashionable questions rarely posed in current cinema: if there is a God, why does He allow evil things to happen? What is the nature of human identity? How do we cope with guilty? One leitmotif is the line: “We have to go on living.” Potentially clichéd, here it reveals the true cost of survival, its brutal and visceral effects. As in Almodovar’s All About My Mother (whose soundtrack Gustavo Santaolalla seems to cite in a wistful accordion theme), organ transplants are used as a metaphor for the all-too physical way in which people touch one another’s lives, bringing love and death unerringly in their wake. Paul literally confronts his own heart, pickled in a jar after the operation. “Is that my heart?” he says, adding wryly, “The culprit.” In Gonzalez Inarritu’s relentlessly austere universe event vital organs have their guilt.
For all the brilliance of his plot construction and the seriousness of his moral enquiry, however, Gonzalez Inarritu remains primarily a poet of the visible world. Among the glittering, inexplicable shards of the opening sequence is a brief shot of birds rising, black against a blood-red sky. At the end we are treated to its mirror image, with a flock falling like leaves over a sky that is now streaked with blue. After a shattering climax which has brought the three main characters together for the first and last time, this is the clearest sign from this bleak triumph that there is still hope even after that cruellest and most banal of tragedies: a traffic accident.