Ray Pride

Life's a puzzle and, increasingly, talented and ambitious filmmakers are turning narrative filmmaking into tangled, enigmatic forms as well. The 40-year-old Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu made his mark with 2000's "Amores Perros," scrambling the lives of three Mexico City residents involved in a sudden and damaging car crash. Working again with writer Guillermo Arriaga and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Iñárritu transposes a similar narrative to contemporary Memphis, but splinters the story even farther. The plot of "21 Grams"--which a blunt speech cites as the weight lost upon death--is almost on the plangent, bathetic level of soap opera, but Iñárritu and Arriaga's furious prefiguring of time propels the three central performances into more of an emotional road wreck than the incident that draws them together. Sean Penn's mathematician, needing a heart transplant, gets one after a man dies in a hit-and-run; Benicio del Toro, the religion-riven, guilt-fraught driver of the ill-fated truck; and Naomi Watts, depressed, angry and drugged-up after her husband's untimely death. It's grim yet mesmerizing stuff, particular with Watts' remarkable wattage: she's the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. "21 Grams" joins this year's bumper crop of movies--"Mystic River" and "House of Sand and Fog" are two more--competing for the title of "feel-bad movie of the year." 125m.

"21 Grams" is now playing.

(2003-11-26)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Art outside the gallery and work outside of boundaries: a program of short documentaries about disobedience with symbols in a symbolism-laden time
(2003-11-19)

The lie of the mind
Okay, so a movie's first scene has little Penelope Cruz squinting her little eyes and squeezing her small Spanish accent, telling her shrink, "He opened me like a flower of pain and it felt gooooooooood...
(2003-11-19)

Childish things
Nicolas Philibert's "To Be and To Have" is a magnificent construction of empathy, a quietly heartfelt portrait of a dozen or so pupils in a single-room school in an isolated French farming village
(2003-11-19)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-11-19)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-13)

Fearless
(2003-11-13)

Potter's field
(2003-11-13)

Short Runs
(2003-11-13)

Blackbird flies next door
(2003-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-05)

The revolution will not be realized
(2003-11-05)

I miss the innocence
(2003-11-05)

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