21 Grams (2003)

Auteur directors can’t seem to resist melodrama. Todd Haynes did it with Far From Heaven, Schrader with Forever Mine, Lumet with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. There’s loads of examples. They love it. Probably it’s because whackadoo crazy plots give them more legroom than boring dopey realism, without them having to make art-films that nobody watches. De Mille, Minnelli, Sirk and Ray were doing this at the exact point that Europeans said Hollywood was dumb (loveable, but dumb) and it was time to do something entirely different – and the Europeans thereupon made the greatest films of all time. The 70s saw the American backlash, recrowning realism as the one true monarch of cinema, and so auteurism since then has been all about working within those confines. Melodrama is one acceptable mode of testing the walls of the cell.

Iñárritu (look at the trouble I’ve gone to there! Not really - cut and paste) sort of joins the melodrama club but takes the clichés of daytime TV movies and soap operas that we’ve seen once and avoided a hundred times, and petulantly turns them into a stern wallowing in abject misery for two hours, like a German East Enders. Let’s enumerate some of these classics. The phone call of doom, “Is that Mrs Jones? I’m afraid there’s been (((AN ACCIDENT)))” – that’s here, including the recipient of the call doing their Best Acting. The romantic cliché of “I was transplanted your husband’s heart and now I love you too” – that’s here. Someone saying “Hell? THIS is hell” to a priest – hello again. There’s a plan for murder, there’s a gun-point speech, there’s suicide in the middle of a row.  Iñárritu (paste again) obviously knows these and more are all bad TV bullshit, and what interests him is whether something can still be done with them if they’re placed in a different style and context.

He mainly does it by literalising the “shattered lives” idea with the mosaic breaking-up of chronology, but also it’s just the downbeat look of the film, which is very naturalistic (if you didn’t know the cast, you would easily think this was a 70s “New Hollywood” film) and the way everything is humourlessly super-grave all the way through (also very 70s). 21 Grams is not about giving us a quick buzz-jolt like we’re chimps pressing a fun-button, 21 Grams is here to tell us to grow up and stop being happy.

Now please understand, I’m not knocking this way of doing it. I don’t get the “snarky reductionism = the real truth” approach to films that says “if you take away all the things Iñárritu does to make this not-a-daytime-TV-movie, why, it’s just a daytime TV movie! We’re too smart for him.” Right, but all those non-TV things are, in fact, the entire vibe of the film, so, strange take.

The result is interesting. Naomi Watts, her soul rent in twain by grief but still looking very pretty, more or less takes the film, but at its rather distended length none of the cast can maintain our interest to the very end and a certain retaliatory scepticism may start to creep into the viewer’s reactions. This is a shame because considerable effort has gone into making each character represent a different attitude to life, a different way of coping with pain, a different colour-scheme for each one. There’s a hand-held minimalist spontaneity to the style which works, with unbalanced frame-compositions that create feelings of isolation or intimacy depending on the scene. I yearn for its seriousness to be taken seriously, and wish it would make that easier for us. But so much of that is down to the culture as much as the film.

If it had been released in a different decade, people would probably call it a modernist version of Greek tragedy, and then other people would say “no, it’s a critique of tragedy!”, “no, it succumbs to nihilism!”, “on the contrary, sir! I see it as Catholic through and through!” and the culture would be more interesting all round, but then other people would say, “you know, maybe being ok because of someone else’s heart is, like, just too weird? And that’s why Sean Penn and Naomi Watts feel so fucked up, because yeah ok they’re banging and she’s hot but you’re not going to feel great about it, right, because of the sitch? so in the end, they’re just like, whoa, freak out.”  And then we’d be pretty much back to where we are now. 60s or 70s, either of those you’d be fine, but 2003, you’ve missed the window. Now you’re just an “indie movie.” This, I submit, is the tragedy.