21 Grams

06/05

Drama/US, Mexico/English (Japanese subtitles)/125mins
Starring: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Focus Films

21 Grams is the weight of a human soul and is measurable by comparing the live weight of a person with their dead weight. We will have to take the filmmaker’s word for that. The relevance of souls and their weight is both oblique and appropriate to this challenging film, the first English language work from excessively talented Mexican Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who made a splash with his first film Amores Perros.
The film is challenging and engrossing because of its crafted, gripping portrayal of three strangers in crisis. It is made the more challenging because of the way the story is chopped up and thrown around like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw, which you have to assemble for yourself as you watch.

The focus of the story is a hit and run accident, a moment of accidental violence and death that unites three apparently disparate people. The driver of the car is Jack (Benicio Del Toro) who is an ex-con trying to go straight and sober, a shambles of a man who has found Christ as a substitute for crime and addiction but who barely understands the fundamentals of his assumed faith. The heart of the accident victim is transplanted into a desperately ill, emotionally fractured maths teacher Paul (Sean Penn), who hires a private detective to find out about the donor. The wife of the victim, Cristina, (Naomi Watts) is knocked off the rails back into bad old habits of cocaine and alcohol.

The swirl of events without chronological order is rather like the flying fragments of an image smashed by the car crash and the broken effect emphasises the alienation of the characters whose lives were anyway fragile.

The editing and writing is a feat on its own but the meticulous, emotionally charged acting makes the film gripping to the point where you don’t notice the difficult structure. Naomi Watts, who was so compelling in Mulholland Drive, assures her place with this performance as the most able female actor in Hollywood.

The Day after Tomorrow

06/05

Disaster/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/124mins
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum
Director: Roland Emerich
20th Century Fox

Over the next twenty years climate change will bring Siberian weather to temperate European and US cities, drown coastal conurbations, cause widespread rioting, pitch nations into conflict over dwindling space and resources, displace millions and greatly increase the chances of a nuclear exchange. This is not the plot of The Day after Tomorrow, these are the findings of a Pentagon national security review leaked earlier this year, that claims global warming is a greater threat to US and world security than terrorism or rogue states.

A pretty scary vision. So why does director/writer/environmentalist Roland Emerich, when he is on an obvious mission to persuade, and when there is so many urgent real world problems, create such a patently absurd vision of climatic calamity?

In Emerich’s version, the process of change is compressed into a matter of days, with mega storms sucking super-cooled air from the troposphere and creating an instant ice age across the northern hemisphere and almost everyone freezing to death.

As is the way with disaster pics, the story hinges on the one man with all the answers, in this case Dennis Quaid, a climatologist who tries to convince a sceptical US government of the dangers in store and then walks through a raging blizzard from Philadelphia to New York to find his son. His son, being a chip off the old block, is busy keeping a cool head when all around are getting theirs frozen, saving lives and impressing his teenage girlfriend into undying love. Quaid has a wife too, who exists only to fret about her son and provide an irrelevant sub plot about a cancer-stricken child.

Aside from a call to environmental arms, the film is the ultimate disaster flick and disaster is what Emerich excels at. With the aid of CG we see LA demolished by twisters and New York swamped by a tidal wave and then buried in ice. Along the way he sneaks in some nice jibes at the smugness of the developed world.

In his mission to persuade, Emerich falls out the pulpit. In his mission to thrill, he provides a rollicking good yarn.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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