My first post was a little bit of a dud. But now I will start what I was looking forward to since I last made this blog two hours ago ... movie reviews!
It's a sad concept, and would make for a very interesting book, or novella. In 1907 Dr. Duncan MacDougall tried to gather scientific evidence of the human spirit. His research indicated that each time a person dies, we lose 21 grams. That's the weight of our spirit, what makes humans human. Of course, his ideas and research were totally dismissed as being unscientific, and well, wrong. But it makes for one amazing movie title.
21 Grams is the story of Cristina Peck, Jack Jordan, and Paul Rivers -that's Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, and Sean Penn - and their (incredibly depressing) stories and how they intertwine with each other. It's one of my favorite plot devices, also used in Crash (one of my favorite movies) and in Iñarritu's (the director of 21 Grams) other film, Babel, and his other film, which I have as-of-yet not seen, Amorres Perros. If you've seen either, you know where 21 Grams is heading, though.
Cristina has just lost her family; Paul is dying of heart failure, and needs an organ transplant; and Jordan is an ex-convict who has found a new life in Christianity. The movie interweaves their stories seamlessly. I can't give away too much, though, because it might ruin it.
I usually like movies alot more after I've had time to dwell on them (and by that same token, I many times come to hate movies after I've initially liked them). I think this is one that I'm liking more the more I think about it. It's initially just too shocking and depressing to really "like," it's kind of like saying I "like" reading Anne Frank's diary. That I watched it with my parents (nudity plays a large role) didn't make it much better. But it was definitely beautiful. I don't usually cry during movies, unless it's Sophie's Choice (which I hope to write about soon), but it's impossible not to while watching Naomi Watts' reaction as she learns the fate of her beautiful family. I don't know which was harder to stomach: watching her in 21 Grams, or watching Sean Penn in Mystic River, when he finds out about his daughter (which isn't giving away anything, that's pretty much the first thing that happens in the movie).
But the movie's themes themselves are hard to swallow. What is our soul? How intricately is our soul tied to our bodies? How are we tied to the people around us? Sean Penn is a mathematician in the movie, and his description of mathematics is anything but boring; it's beautiful. He describes to Cristina how mathematics is the study of our relationship to eachother; the study of fate and coincidences; for anything to happen - whether it's meeting somebody, getting into an accident, falling in love - there must be a delicate balance of occurences that lead up to it. Then, there's the question of faith and falling in love. Is it possible to start again, after you've lost everything?
If you can get past the stark brutality of the movie, it can really get you thinking. It definitely seems like the typical dramatic film that appears to have been made solely for grabbing awards, but it was much more than that. It just strips it's characters apart, and it's a little hard not to look away.
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