"21 Grams" is the movie I've always wanted to watch, after watching "Love is a Son of a bitch" and After "Tower of Babel", I became more determined to watch this film. From the very beginning of the film, you can feel Gonzalez's consistent style of rough grainy images, hand-held shaking lenses, multi-threaded out-of-order narratives, and deep religious feelings.
After watching it, the film borrows the name 21 grams more, and rarely touches the weight of the soul itself. The 21 grams here is synonymous with the soul, just like the Babel Tower represents the inability to communicate in language. The tone of the film is low and depressing, making people almost breathless, it is easy to think of the experience brought by "Dancer in the Darkness": seeing one's own efforts and hopes being mercilessly engulfed by the boundless darkness and despair. The difference is that "21 Grams" does not seem to point the arrow to the ultimate and unreasonable target of human nature, but to the powerlessness of redemption and the impermanence of fate. It was just a traffic accident that easily pushed the three families to the top of the wave and smashed them into pieces. Paul suffers from a serious heart disease, and his wife wants to have a child through artificial insemination, but Paul is reluctant; Jack has a criminal record, and after his release, his religious devotion has reached an incomparable level. The kids were tough, too; Christie had been addicted to drugs, then rehabilitated and lived a peaceful life, with lovely children. A traffic accident changed everything that was hard-won. Jack killed Christy's husband and children by car. He couldn't forgive himself. Without any witnesses, he voluntarily surrendered himself and did not ask his wife to hire a lawyer. He wanted to commit suicide in prison, but was released due to insufficient evidence. Christie was so devastated that she went back to her drug addiction. Paul got the heart donated by Christie's husband. After a search, he knew the ins and outs of the accident. He began to accompany Christy and hated Jack, the perpetrator of the accident. His wife eventually left because of his disappearance. When Paul When he took a gun to teach Jack, he didn't shoot and kill Jack, but Jack found Paul and Christie and asked Paul to kill him. In the chaos, Christie hit Jack who didn't resist with a weapon, and Paul shot himself. heart. Jack told the police that it was his own shooting, Christie found himself pregnant when he asked for his blood to Paul, and it was Paul's child... In this way, death and new life, depravity and redemption, despair and hope are intertwined , takes us to a cold and cruel space, which is extraordinarily vast, extraordinarily cramped, extraordinarily empty, and extraordinarily crowded.
The premise of the whole film is that, assuming that everyone cannot escape the gravity of the soul, they have redemption after indulgence and return to weight and calm after drifting and glitz. So the starting point of the film is the prodigal son. Of course, this film touches more on the fragility of calm, which somewhat disappointed us in the city. We thought that we would cherish the sunshine more because we saw so much darkness, we thought that we would cherish the peace we finally got, and we could get old in a blink of an eye, we thought that we could finally walk away from all kinds of temptations and no longer “step on” into the same river" . . . This film just wanted to touch on this life after redemption. The hope of reconstruction was not firm, and there was destiny above God. "21 Grams" has almost spared no effort in destroying this good hope, and it is not until the end that there is a trend of exhaustion: after death, new life emerges. It is said that the intention of this film is to return to the original state of life, the original alternation of death and rebirth. I don't care much about that. I care about how I can get out of this seemingly fatalistic pessimism. I don't want it to affect my hope, that fragile hope. So, I declare it a pessimistic movie, and I am not prepared to live a pessimistic life.
"21 Grams" is very bold in its cutting of narrative units. Time and space are interlaced, and cause and effect are reversed. It is far less regular than "Tower of Babel". Basically, only after seeing the end can a complete story be formed in my mind. Narrative isn't everything, and the overemphasis on the technique may be dazzling, but the film's unconventional narrative brightens up what could have been a didactic story, which is a cliché, but it doesn't work. There is also Sean Penn's performance of returning to nature with ease, which is also a bright spot.
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