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Film from 2003, which finds in the title the advertising solution that guaranteed it queues at the box office. 21 Grams. According to legend, the weight that is lost when the human soul leaves the body in the transition to a better life.
But let's proceed in order: the film is technically well-crafted. In the first ten minutes, it even manages to be intriguing. Excellent cinematography and the tension communicated by a sequence of silent, unconnected scenes, in a non-strictly chronological order. It will be up to the viewer to piece everything together to construct the background of a story with a simple yet heartrending and dramatic substance.
Benicio Del Toro, an ex-convict, runs over Naomi Watts' husband and her daughters with an SUV. The husband's heart is transplanted into Sean Penn, who is still gravely ill and will almost certainly host the new heart only to prolong his suffering. Naomi Watts thinks it best to visit Sean Penn, who wanders around the house with IVs and tubes in his nose, and to engage in a bit of petting. Meanwhile, Benicio Del Toro, an ex-con and religious fanatic, simply cannot comprehend all the bad things he has done in life.
Aside from the cinematography and the presence of good actors, this film manages to unite, more than ever, a sickeningly pedantic rhetoric with a useless and burdensome tragedy for the viewer. It is of the sort that leaves the audience in such a state of stillness that upon leaving the theater, they don't even feel like commenting on what they've seen.
I am pleased to review this film today, because usually, the viewing of the moment succumbs to the subliminal effect of advertising messages ('21 grams... oh!.. what poetry...') and misleads the audience with the moral blackmail of the drama, almost as if speaking ill of the film equates to disrespecting the topics addressed, due to an absurd transitive law. The classic tricks, in short, of many of our local screenwriters, to ensure a minimum of critical favor, serving up blatant nonsense.
The rising star of 'auteur cinema', Alejandro González Iñárritu (he should find himself a pseudonym!... just kidding...) should rewatch 'Blood Work' by a director with much more modest 'evangelical' ambitions named Clint Eastwood. Here the issue of heart transplantation is handled without hypocrisy and without boredom; certainly, it has a less articulated and pretentious bioethical structure, the work cited is certainly not this great masterpiece, but cinema must know how to speak to the heart (sorry for the pun) without needlessly being onerous.
For tragedies and hypocritical long faces, Cucuzza is enough for us.
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