The Cooler and 21 Grams: Three Directions at Once - Page 4

Jack's story is, of course, much farther down the social scale than Sister Luke's--he loses a job as a caddy at a country club because the clubmembers are uncomfortable with the tattoo on his neck--and not surprisingly that makes his situation worse. Spiritual pride is the only pride Jack has left; when it's gone he's beyond consolation. And of course the lower depths are no barrier to the work required for naturalism, which is all about actual details as you'd find them in the real world. Jack's story would have been wonderful shot in sequence by itself.

Especially if Jack's wife Marianne (Melissa Leo) had been developed more. What we get is that while she is better off with a law-abiding and sober husband, he's still headstrong in a way that makes her life barely manageable. Having to sneak a beer in the kitchen during a party is nothing compared to his bewildering insistence on turning himself in to the police after he's accidentally run over a man and his two little girls with the truck Jesus gave him.

Meanwhile, the dead man's wife Cristina (Naomi Watts) approves the donation of his heart and it ends up in Paul (Sean Penn), a gravely ill man whose wife is trying to get pregnant by him before he dies. The transplant actually brings about their separation and Paul tries to rediscover his identity by finding the protected name of the donor and working his way into her life. Since the accident Cristina has headed back to the heavy partying she had stopped when she got married, but when she finds out who Paul is she insists that he help her kill Jack in order to get her life back on track.

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.

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 …

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