Fractured timeline distracts from '21 Grams'

By Bruce Newman
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Circumstances link recovering druggie Cristina (Naomi Watts) top, and religious fundamentalist ex-con Jack (Benicio del Toro) above. Gannett News Service photos '21 Grams' R, for foul talk, sexuality, violence and drug abuse 125 minutes

In Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "21 Grams," the lives of three people shatter into sharp shards of horror, regret and despair, and we watch as the fragments form themselves into a dazzling picture puzzle. The storytelling is intentionally cryptic, the film's look is grainy and disorienting, and the effect is devastating.

This may be the most brilliantly made movie of the year. But you don't enjoy "21 Grams," you recover from it.

The interlocking stories of the three main characters are told out of sequence, in narratives that dart back and forth in time. At first, this is merely bewildering. Then it becomes irritating. But the final effect of writer Guillermo Arriaga's inspired architecture is a film that causes us to make the same easy assumptions about characters that we make every day in real life, only to have the story double back on itself and prove the snap judgments wrong.

This is the second film Inarritu and Arriaga have made together, and like "Amores perros," its Oscar-nominated predecessor, the story hangs on the horrifying caprices of fate that bring people together. Paul (played by Sean Penn) is a math professor with a failing heart, who comes into the broken life of Cristina (Naomi Watts), the unintended victim of Jack (Benicio Del Toro), God's hell-on-wheels disciple. But the movie's plot is only a centrifuge, spinning remorselessly until it throws these three unlikely acquaintances together.

The performances don't feel like performances at all. Penn has achieved a level of such perfect naturalism that you feel as if you're spying on him. Del Toro finds the brutish sadness in a man who wants to do good but doesn't know how. Watts, who was so stunning in "Mulholland Drive," has a raw, wounded intensity that makes Paul — and us — want to hold her until the bleeding has stopped.

Inarritu and Arriaga are Mexicans working in English for the first time, but "21 Grams" relies on a visual language that feels European. It's like a bad dream that you can't stop, accumulating force until it snaps you awake.