To give a comprehensive plot synopsis of 21 Grams would be to ruin the effect of Iñárritu’s scattershot approach to storytelling. The film opens with a post-coital scene of Christina (Naomi Watts) sleeping naked on a bed next to Paul (Sean Penn), who is pensively smoking a cigarette. Cut to a diner booth where a man and his two young daughters have just finished their meal. The two girls keep their father busy as he tries to get them cleaned up and ready to leave. Cut to Christina at a twelve-step meeting, where she reveals that in the past she’d flat-lined from a drug overdose, continued using, but then came clean when she discovered she was pregnant with her first daughter. She has stayed clean since then with the love and support of her husband and two young daughters.
In the first eighty seconds the viewer can only assume that the man and the two girls from the diner scene are Christina’s husband and children, but how does Paul, naked on the bed with Christina in the first scene, fit into this scenario? Iñárritu leaves this question open and cuts to a scene where the reformed but shaky ex-con Jack (Benicio Del Toro) plays Jenga with a surly juvenile delinquent in the center of what appears to be an empty meeting hall/soup kitchen. Jack lectures the kid about Jesus.
He has the deep level of devotion of someone who’s been saved (crucifix and burning heart tattoos), and his devotion becomes creepy when he shows the kid the truck he’d won in a raffle. He’d had “FAITH” and “Jesus Saves!” airbrushed across the back. “Jesus gave me that truck,” Jack says. The next scene goes back to Paul, now lying sickly in a hospital bed, narrating in voice-over on the subject of dying.
As the film’s plot slowly reveals itself, the question, “What do these disparate scenes add up to?” turns into, “How will the film add up to these scenes?” Flash forwarding the final scenes early in the film reveals enough of the plot to force the viewer to begin constructing the story on their own. Does Jack shoot Paul? It appears so, but why? How do these three intense storylines cross, and where? Every second shifts the plot into clearer focus.
This tactic could be written off as a cheap style trick employed to make the movie interesting, as in so many of the films that popped up after Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, yet what’s driving Iñárritu’s approach is content. The plot of 21 Grams is so well constructed that by fragmenting it, by teasing it out, the viewer instead is impelled to pay attention to the characters and wonder how their actions will move the plot forward. How does Jack go from being a religious family man to a dirty loner living in a cheap motel room? Does Paul take up with the British woman before or after Christina? Does he need a heart transplant before or after he’s shot in the chest?
These questions, though pressing, take a backseat to the raw drive and emotion exuded by these impetuous characters, portrayed by a stellar cast. This is Benicio Del Toro at his best. This is Sean Penn in the role that should have given him an Oscar nod — forget Mystic River. These are damaged people searching for meaning in their lives. These are people led by the heart. And this is a film you should see.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
