D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Bill’s Review
Easily one of the more harrowing movies you are likely to see this year, 21 Grams is also difficult and depressing. But for those who stick with it, they will be rewarded with a top-notch movie from one of cinema’s rising stars, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros)
The title (and full thanks to Entertainment Weekly for saying what everyone else was thinking—the movie has nothing to do with drugs except that all of the principals seem to be taking them and after viewing the audience may need them) refers to the mythical weight of the soul as it leaves a dying body.
Inarritu’s story centers around three characters: Paul (Benicio del Toro), an ex-con trying to get his life straightened out with faith and sobriety; Naomi Watts as Christiana, a suburban wife and mother of two whose wild days are seemingly behind her; and Sean Penn’s Paul, a professor awaiting a heart for transplant. All three unknowingly interfere with each other lives and become locked together by the end of the narrative.
The difficulty for viewers is not simply the subject matter—which would be tough enough—but the narrative presentation as Inarritu jumps from present to future and back to the now past as characters who have yet to be introduced to each other speak knowingly of events the audience has yet to see. Often the viewer sees the aftermath only to be later shown the event that precipitated it.
The movie’s theme (if you will allow me to wax academic) is about the difficulty of forgiveness in the modern world—people’s inability to forgive themselves as well as others. Describing the plot or discussing the depressing and seemingly inevitable conclusions of these interlocked lives does not really do the movie justice. The depth of feelings that director Inarritu and his co-screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga are able to convey on screen are truly breathtaking. And with a cast this special to bring this story to life, moviegoers are in for a too-rare treat.

In Jafar Panahi’s latest movie Crimson Gold, the Iranian director of The Circle and The White Balloon uses a picaresque crime story as the jumping off point for his commentary on the disparity between rich and poor in contemporary Iran. Panahi’s too-rare ability to draw in the viewer and made them feel what characters are living through (despite how alien these experiences are to their own lives) is the movie’s strongest asset.
Hussein (first-time actor Hossain Emadeddin) delivers pizzas by motorcycle. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, cortisone treatments have grossly inflated his body. Moreover, his inability to get ahead leave him in a depression that even his impending wedding cannot salve. As we follow Hussein throughout his nights and days, he and we are constantly confronted by society’s inequities. To western eyes, long inured to the disparities of wealth in our capitalist world, it is barely noticed, but as the film progresses Hussein is forced to look at his own life and see how others live.
A stolen purse reveals a ticket for an item being repaired at a jeweler’s shop valued at an unimaginable sum. One pizza is delivered to an old commander who barely recognizes him due to his substantial weight gain. Hossein mentions the cortisone treatments (a woefully inadequate medical treatment for someone living in the 21st century), acknowledges that he barely recognizes himself, before the officer recalls what a good man he “was” and makes nebulous future offers to help. He and his intended are turned away from a jewelry store because of his shabby appearance. Secret police performing surveillance activity delay him without explanation or apology—disturbing his life matters not to the men who are involved in the much more important “work” of making sure that men and women do not fraternize. Another delivery results in a visit to the opulent house of a spoiled man-child who insists that Hussein join him in eating the pizzas the householder had only ordered in a now fizzled seduction plan. A walk through the palatial place only depends Hussein’s feelings of desperation.
Over and over again, our lonely man is told that his presence is no longer necessary and certainly not something valued. His frustration will result in a nihilistic act, robbing a jewelry store and committing murder, the depiction of which bookends the movie’s narrative.
Panahi’s social activist kind of filmmaking was seen to better effect with The Circle where its depiction of women in Iran’s theocracy is painted as an unyielding and horrifying trap. Perhaps the slackness in the story and the numbing deadness of tone here is deliberate to isolate the audience in Hussein’s world. Just as likely that the dull repetition in the screenplay (as opposed to The Circle) is the result of Panahi collaborating once more with fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (who also wrote the script for The White Balloon). The most acclaimed of Iran’s filmmakers, Kiarostami is a taste I have yet to acquire. He is from that school of artists who live by the dictate, “I have suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.” His films are chiefly characterized by pointlessly protracted, boring sequences in which not much happens and repetition is mistaken for depth.
What a director like Panahi sees in him is beyond me, but nothing enlivens a Kiarostami film as much as decreasing his participation.