Sean Penn is Paul, a generally quiet, inward man, given a second chance at life when a heart transplant suddenly turns up.  The heart is from Naomi Watts’ husband, and Paul takes to following her around before finally making contact in rather awkward fashion.  Penn is good here, though a far cry from the tough he played in Mystic River – the scene in which he tries to fake a murder is funny in spite of its overall character.  He seems not to have any real sense of how to relate to other people, except perhaps to Watts, whom he begins to obsess over.

    Watts plays Christina, a depressed, bitter woman who lost her husband and two young daughters in a hit-and-run accident.  While Christina’s loss cannot be minimized, her method of dealing with it is distinctly selfish – first she declines to press charges against the driver because it wouldn’t bring her family back, but then later insists to Paul that the man needs to be killed.

    The man in question is Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro), an ex-con who found religion in prison and now spreads the word everywhere he can – but his faith is tested, if not outright destroyed, by the car accident, as he wonders why God would have allowed it to happen.

    Jordan is really the most likable character in the film.  While Paul is borderline creepy and Christina a bit of a shrew, Jack feels strong, sincere guilt over what he has done.  He turns himself in against the desires of his wife, and when a lawyer helps spring him early, he leaves his family to contemplate his crime.  Though Del Toro will be pushed for supporting awards, Jack is really the anchor of the film, his moral compass centering director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s questions about life and death.

    Though the performances are strong – Watts is tear-jerking in the scene where Christina learns of her family’s fate – and the atmosphere effective, 21 Grams has definite issues.  First are the characterizations.  As I noted above, two of the three characters are not particularly likable; in addition, none of the characters are especially consistent.  All right, they’re dealing with traumatic events, but only Jack seems to respond in a recognizably human way, and even his behavior feels rather exaggerated.

    Another problem is the choice to shuffle the film’s chronology, which feels like more of a gimmick than anything else.  Aside from perhaps creating a little extra tension in some parts of the narrative, the time-switching – which is mostly random – doesn’t seem to have any deliberate purpose.  It could be said that this is the confusion of the limbo-like world manifesting itself on the viewer, but it hardly seems necessary and is more just distracting.

    Iñárritu does a good job of setting up a world that somehow seems to exist between life and death, with people who feel they shouldn’t or don’t deserve to be alive.  What he doesn’t do is make those characters compelling enough or make the trip through the world a straightforward one.  The end of the film is fairly satisfying, all things considered, as the characters have navigated this limbo and emerged from it in their own different ways, but the process of getting to that point from the setup was unnecessarily jumbled.

   Though it can be emotionally complex and has a promising setup, 21 Grams devolves too much into screaming and gimmickry before finally pulling itself together.  The first and last acts (narratively speaking) are solid, but it is in between that 21 Grams could have used, if you’ll forgive the expression, a little more weight.  B-

21 Grams is a Focus Features release.  Rated for language, sexuality, some violence and drug use.