21 Grams

21 Grams (2003) follows three people joined by a car accident, with the events shown out of order. Paul is a mathematics professor waiting for a heart transplant. Cristina is a woman who has come out of addiction and lives with her husband and two daughters. Jack has been in prison, has turned to religion and is trying to hold himself together. One day Jack's car kills Cristina's husband and both daughters. The same day Paul receives a heart. The film does not put the three lives in order. Scenes arrive from before the accident, after it and long after it, shuffled. You see a character healthy in one scene and dying in the next. The structure is deliberately scattered: grief does not proceed in order, it arrives mixed. It is the second film by Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga and their first in English. Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro star. Watts and del Toro were both nominated for Oscars. Rodrigo Prieto shot it; the image is grainy and the camera is constantly handheld. The title comes from a claim made in a measurement a century ago that the body becomes twenty one grams lighter at the moment of death. That measurement was never scientifically confirmed; the film uses it as a question rather than a fact. Jack is the hardest thing in it: a man who wants to be punished rather than forgiven, and nobody will give him that. It runs 124 minutes. Good for: multi strand narrative, films about grief, and performance. Less good for: the editing is deliberately exhausting and the film is hopeless throughout.