Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 21 Grams: my breakdown of the film

My breakdown of Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 21 Grams

I want to share my thoughts on 21 Grams, the 2003 American drama directed by Alexandro Inarritu Gonzales starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio del Toro, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. First, though, I’d like to thank you for watching this video and I’d appreciate if you’d hit the like button at the end and subscribe to my channel for more videos.

Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's 2003 drama 21 Grams is the 2nd film to Gonzales’ and co-writer Guillermo Arriaga’s “Trilogy of Death” series preceded by 2001s Amores Perros and followed by 2006s Babel starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The title of this film comes from an American Scientist named Duncan MacDougall. In 1907 MacDougall wanted to prove that we lose 21 grams at the time of death and that this 21 grams is the soul leaving the body. He weighed 6 bodies at the moment of death and only 1 lost 21 grams, 21.3 to be exact. Needless to say, his test was discounted by the scientific community.

In this film, 21 Grams is a metaphor for all the things that have to happen for 2 people to come together; 21 Grams is about how we are all connected; it’s about water and the many chances that we get to live; 21 Grams is about learning to accept the bad things that happen to all of us. Most of all, 21 Grams it’s about learning to see life as a blessing and not as a guarantee.

Life, death, and rebirth

Everything in nature has an opposite: 2 legs, 2 arms, 2 eyes. There’s light and darkness, hot and cold, weak and strong, male/female, left and right.

In 21 Grams, life and death complement each other. 

For instance, Mary goes to a fertility doctor to have the child of her dying husband; when Michael dies his heart gives Paul a 2nd chance to live; Paul is dying in the hospital when Cristina learns that she is pregnant with his child; and Michael and his daughters are run over and killed by Jack whose birthday happens to be on that same day.

Life creates death and death creates life as Socrates put it, in question and answer form, from Plato’s book Phaedo: 

Question: “Is not death opposed to life?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: “And they are generated one from the other?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: ”What is generated from life?”

Answer: “Death.”
Question: “And what from death?”

Answer: “I can only say in answer -- life.” 

Question: “Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated from the dead?”

Answer: “That is clear,” he replied. 

Water

We’ve all heard the saying: “cleanliness is next to godliness,” right? Nothing feels better than having a clean fresh home, clean clothes, a clean car--but none of these are possible without good clean water. But let’s think of water and clean in another sense. In the Bible, water is used to symbolize death and rebirth in the rite of baptism--death in that the person baptized has all of his or her prior sins erased (or washed) and starts over with a clean slate. This is described as being “born again,” not in the literal sense, but in that the individual has been awakened to a higher realm of consciousness. This is why water, in this sense, is an important thematic element in 21 Grams. 

Let’s start with the characters’ names and how they relate to the film’s plot. Jordan--Jack’s last name--is the river in the Bible that Joshua crosses in leading the Israelites to the Promised Land; the connotation of Jack’s last name also coincides with his character arc. Jack’s “Promised Land” is him receiving a higher level of awareness: 

He starts out believing that God favors him because he got out of prison, stopped drinking alcohol, and turned his life over to Jesus Christ. Religious icons such as crosses fill his truck and home for protection. He and his family attend church regularly; he is even working with a troubled teenager named Nick. But when Jack kills Cristina’s family by running over them in his truck, he undergoes a spiritual shakeup. How could something bad happen to him when he was doing everything right? How could God allow him to get in his truck and kill a man and 2 little girls? Killing Cristina’s family and losing everything humbles Jack and teaches him that doing all the right things (including being a Christian) does not exclude him from all the ups and downs of life. 

Likewise, the death of Christina’s husband and 2 daughters catches her completely off-guard. Prior to giving birth to her 1st daughter, Cristina had kicked her quit using drugs and had become the perfect wife and mother. But losing Michael and her 2 daughters so suddenly is too much for her and she goes back to her drug habit. She then decides to kill Jack instead of moving on with her life and pressures Paul, who has her husband’s heart, to help her. Paul goes back to smoking which ruins his new heart. When all of the dust has settled by the end of the movie, Cristina finds out that she is pregnant with Paul’s baby and winds up in the same position she was in before, when she faced the decision to either stop using drugs or to keep using them and risk losing Paul’s unborn child.

Finally, Paul gets a 2nd chance at life by receiving Michael’s heart. But after meeting Cristina and her pressuring him to kill Jack, Paul goes back to his old smoking habit which makes his new heart go bad. His failing heart is the swimming pool he sits by at the motel; notice that the swimming pool is empty and full of garbage; his decision to help Cristina kill Jack has poisoned Michael’s good heart. Paul doesn’t go through with killing Jack but by this time, Michael’s heart is too far gone to be brought back. 

When we hurt others we hurt ourselves

We don’t get away with anything. When we hurt others, everything in the universe aligns itself to keep us from being happy. Some call this God, others call it karma. There are invisible laws within us that punish us when we go against them, rising up like judge, jury, and executioner to torment us.

In 21 Grams, for instance, Paul returns to smoking when he goes in with Cristina to kill Jack. In doing this, he not only hurts himself, he also hurts Michael who continues to live on through the heart his death has given to Paul; likewise, Cristina’s drug habit not only threatens her health but also the life of her unborn child; also, after Jack completes his prison sentence for killing Cristina’s family, he abandons his own family to wallow in guilt by himself in a motel where he goes back to drinking and smoking cigarettes.

Sometimes bad things happen to good people

Life is not fair. Good people die young and bad people die of old age; fit people get cancer; selfish jerks win lotteries and good people die poor; abusers get the best girls and good guys get the cold shoulder; heroes don’t always ride off into the sunset and, contrary to popular belief, hard work doesn’t always pay off. The fact of the matter is that bad things happen to good people, too.

Likewise, in 21 Grams Jack does all the right things

• He attends church
• He has given up drinking alcohol
• He works with a troubled teenager
• He follows the Bible to the letter

And yet, he gets into his truck on a normal day, sober, feeling better about the future and getting a new job after getting fired and, out of nowhere, he ends up running over 3 people in his truck, panics, and leaves the scene of the incident!

     

Same thing with Cristina who also does all the right things by kicking drugs and becoming the ideal wife and mother. Yet, in a single moment, she loses everything!

Taking life for granted

Some things are just too unpleasant to think about. But death is always going to be a fact of life. From the day we are born our days are numbered. But somewhere along the way we forget how to live and settle for being alive. We learn to look forward to and place special value on birthdays, anniversaries, Valentines Days, and Christmases and we learn to take the smaller bits of our lives--the seconds, hours, days, and months--for granted like that old friend who you know will always be there. Then 1 day someone calls you out the blue to tell you your old friend is dead. Such is the case throughout 21 Grams:

When Michael, before being killed, tells his wife that he and their daughters will see her when they get home

When Michael calls Cristina who lets his last phone call go to her voice mail

When Cristina puts off buying the blue shoes her daughter wants

When Mary aborts Paul’s child and then--when he has only 1 month to live--tries to have his child through artificial insemination

When Jack kills a man and 2 little girls driving home to celebrate his birthday

We all put things off as if we can pause life like a television show and come back to it later. In the meantime we miss out on the small moments as if they are not important, as if they are a given, as if they somehow don’t count; they do!

conclusion

21 Grams begins and ends with Paul Rivers in a hospital bed connected to life support, counting each and every breath, marking time and empty space like seconds on a clock, not knowing which will be his last. But, in a sense, Paul is more alive on his deathbed than at any point in the film, even after getting a new life with Michael’s heart. I wonder, how we would live each and every moment of our lives if we realized that each one of those tiny moments had the potential to be our last.