Cristina's justification is that had Jack stopped and taken his three victims to the hospital, her younger daughter might have lived. What the vengeance plot does to the movie is to turn the story into an ironic romance--Paul becomes the knight out to avenge the wronged damsel--and crank up the histrionics. It's ironic because we don't believe the quest is just or that the knight is up to the task (Paul's body is rejecting the heart and he can barely keep from vomiting while carrying it out). Not to mention the fact that Jack, who has abandoned his family and is trying to eradicate the last vestige of himself in physical labor and solitude, would like nothing more than to be dead.

The problem is that despite the complexity of the story Inarritu doesn't have much feel for details, which gets lost in the fragmented, time-hopping presentation. There's a moment when Paul has followed Cristina into and out of a bar where she has bought drugs from her old dealer and taken them and he convinces her to let him drive. She's stoned and hollering at the attendant who wants to call her a cab and then smashes into the car in front of her, but once Paul talks her into scooching over and giving him the wheel she settles into the passenger seat glassy-eyed ... and fastens her seat belt. I laughed, assuming that Inarritu caught the irony of it, but it stayed in the undifferentiated middle ground along with nearly everything else, and then the moment had flown.

What you get instead of attention to details is USDA beefy dramatic acting. It's the same problem as in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, in which the moviemakers and actors are so intent on the dramatic impact of the story that the story becomes secondary. Maria Bello is so fine in The Cooler because she builds her realistic character out of the specifics of Natalie's story, her futureless past and present, without self-consciousness about the scale or importance of her performance. 21 Grams never gives you a break from its sense of importance. And you know it's serious because the leads have all been made as unattractive as possible--Watts looks like she has cotton stuffed in her lower lips, Penn's face is all crow's feet and beak, and the skin around del Toro's eyes looks like sphincter tissue. With the exception of a bit of offhand flirtation when Paul approaches Cristina at her health club, there isn't a light moment in over two hours. Could someone please spread the word to the awards-seeking moviemakers of the world that unrelieved solemnity is not truer to life, not even in our worst moments.

The presentation of Jack's religious pride at least has a thought-out shape, an ironic one: the believer who wants to be the most devoted messenger and therefore the most valuable servant. But you don't have to experience it from an ironic distance because it's an irony you can identify with. After the accident we see the young man Jack had worked with looking over at him in church with a great, ambiguous expression and the impact is enormous: pride goeth before a fall but you have to keep living after the fall and how do you do that.