The Cooler and 21 Grams: Three Directions at Once - Page 3

The ending manages to restore the romance by a stroke of irony but by that point the movie has torn itself apart. Kramer vitiates a great premise in the process of developing it, but he brings us Bello as a dramatic actress and she's a revelation.

21 Grams

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams from Guillermo Arriaga's script, has three protagonists whose stories, told in tiny, nonsequential segments, eventually converge in a bungled homicide, but there are only two types of narrative at loggerheads here, not three as in The Cooler. The central figure is Jack (Benicio del Toro), an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who has gone straight and become an evangelical Christian. He finds his calling in bringing redemption to young criminals, and his family, with both fists.

Jack talks tough to a young con and he expects his example to carry weight with the kid. He was the lowest of the low but Jesus raised him up, set him on the right path, gave him a truck. When the kid backslides Jack charges in and wants to slap some sense into him. When his son hits his daughter at the dinner table, he makes the little girl hold out her other arm so the boy can hit it, too, to exemplify Jesus's command to turn the other cheek. After his disgusted wife takes the girl away from the table Jack then smacks the boy.

Spiritual pride is a great theme, central to Fred Zinnemann's marvelous 1959 movie The Nun's Story in which Audrey Hepburn's Sister Luke is disappointed when her knowledge and skills aren't put to what she feels would be their best use. It's always hard to accept movie stars as dedicated nuns precisely because they're stars; The Nun's Story is able to use this because Sister Luke's delicate dilemma is wanting to be the very best nun in her order, which constitutes pride, which disqualifies her from the top honors, so she castigates herself to be humbler, and hence better, but must be careful not to congratulate herself for the effort or look for success. The movie brilliantly brings out the A-student egotism of this unrelenting, literal-minded young woman. Sister Luke can't laugh but her situation is profoundly comic: she's trying to stand out in a hierarchical institution the point of which is to humble her in the service of the Lord, to annihilate her ego as a way of ensuring her salvation. Hepburn's luminous eyes shine out from under her compulsively buckled brow as Sister Luke moves toward renunciation; she will finally feel calmly humble only in failure.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog