Penn has an annoying tendency to hunker down into drama, letting the air out so he can keep his performance within the conception of the role (like an anal kid who too carefully crayons within the coloring-book outlines), but the heart transplant plot is too arty to win him the accolades he got for his monotonously determined performance in Mystic River, and it doesn't fit stylistically with Jack's story. And while we're not encouraged to side with Cristina in her vendetta against Jack, neither is that ironic distance which we do maintain accented enough. (For all the fancy editing, Inarritu does nothing special to make us wince when someone tries to convince Cristina to press charges against Jack by stereotyping him as an ex-con and therefore indifferent to the consequences of his actions.) Naomi Watts is a fantastic actress, but even that scarejerker The Ring (2002) made better use of the glimmer of perversity visible in her spring-flower face, the quality that made you accept that a malevolent bogeychild might contact her (and that made her just right for a David Lynch protagonist in Mulholland Drive (2001)). Here, when she howls her pain it seems like an acting exercise.
21 Grams is more endurable than Mystic River because Jack's story is solid in itself, and, to be frank, the jigsaw structure adds a certain amount of incidental interest. But I was more interested in putting the pieces together than I was in looking at the picture once I'd finished.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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