because you can't have too much entertainment...
December 2003

Death Dealers
Reviewed: 21 Grams Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu Starring: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Clea Duvall, Melissa Leo Elephant Directed by Gus Van Sant Starring: a cast of unknowns.

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21 Grams
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's second feature (following his international hit Amores Perros) shares with his first a fascination with death,brutality, and emotional chaos -those happy things that generally accompany life's most torturous moments. It's little wonder than that both films seem on the brink of spontaneous combustion with rage and pain. Unfortunately the fires in this case, are dampened considerably by a portentous heavy handedness. I maintain that if one chooses as subject matter such grim stuff, one should let the thematic material do some of the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately Innaritu lets his ambition get the best of him. Not content to merely present a moving tragedy, the director wishes to make a profound art out of the spectacle of human suffering. To that end the cinematography is heavy and gritty, the editing is disruptive to linear simple storytelling, and the actors assembled are known for their dramatic intenstiy. Inarritu and Arriaga take the performers down with them in their quest for import and meaning. The tragic and twisted storyline brings together and rips apart a dying professor (Sean Penn), a Jesus-freak ex con (Benicio Del Toro), and a young mother who was once a wicked party girl (Naomi Watts). Though the cast assembled is unquestionably a fine one (many of them making startling and vivid immediate impressions) they are undone by the time jumping structure.

It strikes this viewer as a rather odd outcome for a filmic experiment with a celebrated cast. Stop to consider it. Film actors, are, after all, used to thinking and creating their work in this very way. As most films are shot out of sequence, it is part of a film actor's job to control the narrative in their own head, so that they can carefully modulate their performance. They always have to maintain control of where they are emotionally in the storyline, no matter where or when the actual filming takes place. They have to do this, to create a believable through line for their characters, to provide for the audience the joy of watching a well modulated character arc. The great film actors are masters at this. In a very real way, the way film actors perform their art is entirely like the editing of 21 Grams. It's all tiny shards and momentary revelations of feeling.

It is only when the performance is pieced back together in the editing, does the viewer see what the film actor intended all along. The trouble is that with the very ambitious and self mutilating structure of 21 Grams, the last piece of the actor's performance, the external piece found in the editing, is unfinished. There is no key to unlock the performances.

Faring worst of all is Naomi Watts. It's as if the director had seen her mindblowing Mulholland Drive performance and asked her to perform its second act meltdown again. For the length of his entire film. And with the volume turned way up for good measure. Under normal circumstances, a fine actress raging against the heavy hand of fate could be an acting spectacle to treasure. Yet, deprived of emotional grounding and context, Naomi Watts work comes across as screeching histrionics.

In its intended but self-defeating form, 21 Grams amounts to two hours of miserable tedium. I don't begrudge the filmmaker or writer their choice of subject matter. Death, grief, what it means to suffer and be human; these are some of the great subject matters. But there needs to be a reason for portraying them. You need to have something to say to make the brutal journey worth the audiences time. If Inarritu and his writer Arriaga had anything to say in this tale of three lost souls colliding, it was lost on me, numbed as I was by the film's jittery nonsensical composition and lack of emotional range. D+

Elephant
Gus Van Sant has had a fascinating year at the cinema. As if to reclaim his artistic soul from the formulaic could-have-been-made-by-anyone Finding Forrester, he has made two controversial art films in the space of one year. Neither Gerry nor this latest, Elephant, an almost abstract reimagining/vision of the Columbine tragedy, bear even the slightest trace of "selling out". Both are difficult, audience testing films. Elephant, the Cannes winner for 2003, is the more successful of the two. It's both more accessible and more original than Gerry (which was according to the director, largely inspired by the films of Bela Tarr) and the conclusion has more blunt force than Gerry's somewhat pat and expected resolution. Yet it stall falls short of the masterpiece status it shoots for.

The accomplished film has a satisfying grasp on the mundanity of high school, and an easy confidence in dealing with its nonprofessional cast. They all acquit themselves well under Van Sant's ever watchful eye. Most potent within the film is the contribution of Van Sant's director of photography, Harris Savides who also made Gerry such a hypnotic experience. He works even greater wonders in Elephant. Savides' camera under the director's minimalist approach does a superb job of evoking the isolation of high school life, the wierd aloneness of the communal experience. With brilliantly conceived tracking shots that keep circling back in time, Elephant reveals more information each time and yet never fully allows any picture to take. The geography of the school, the lives of its inhabitants, become both vividly realized and utterly unknowable. Just like the unthinkable events that are unfolding in the school.

As an abstract exercize in dealing with a very real and tangible tragedy Elephant is nearly a great film. But Van Sant fumbles badly when dealing with the killers themselves. For a film that soars on its open-ended approach, allowing the audience to ruminate and construct the film to a large degree on their own, we get too much and too specific information about the killers. The time at home with the murderous boys is incredibly botched. Both an out of nowhere dissertation on Hitler and a gay kiss in the shower, neither add nor illuminate to the viewing experience. They merely provoke and explain. Two actions that are far less admirable and less difficult to achieve than the otherwise absorbing approach that Van Sant eschews in the better and earlier portion of the film. Had Elephant avoided these late blooming stumbles, it might have been a minor masterpiece; an abstract, ever changeable look at something both universally familiar and incomprehensible. B

 

-Nathaniel
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