Seeing this movie is seeing a movie both backwards and forwards, since the scenes are not fed chronologically and are not suspended in a straight line. It's unstuck in time. More than foreshadowing events, it lets you imagine. It lets you play the irony of what it is like to anticipate the past, and imagine how, what happened in the future foretells what is happening in the present.
It gives you the feeling that you know for sure that something’s going happen, but you just don’t know when – like dying. And then everything just makes sense while your gaze is intensely glued to the screen, the way an effective short story squeezes the life out your neck while you’re gladly coerced into reading more and more of it.
The film casts Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. The acting is just so superb and downright convincing. These actors make you absorb their character’s hopelessness by showing you that hopelessness does not need saving. Desperation is at its deepest when even redemption no longer required. It's profound drama.
Sean Penn plays someone who’s on the verge of a heart failure, and he not only convinces you that he’s dying, he actually makes you feel what it’s like to have death knocking at your doorstep. Perhaps I can relate more closely since I have a little of a heart condition myself. The movie is sad but it didn’t require an emotionally-charged full orchestra, or the somber, saddening decibels of cellos or weeping violins fading up into the scene every ten seconds. The complementing soundtrack mostly consists of two or three long notes of a guitar or piano, which was simply enough to wrench the saddest emotions seated in the caverns of your heart.
I got the idea that Sean Penn’s character is Math Professor. And this part of the script just took me:
“There is a number hidden in every act of life in every aspect of the universe. Fractuals, matter… and there’s a number screaming to tell us something… numbers are a door to understanding a mystery that’s bigger than us. How two people, strangers, come to meet. There’s a poem by a Venezuelan writer that begins --- ‘the earth turned to bring us closer. It turned on itself and in us until it finally brought us together in this dream.’ There are so many things that has to happen for two people to meet. Anyway, that’s what mathematics is.”
While I reveled in the experience of watching it, I’d weigh it as a not-so-easy movie which
requires full attention. It’s not exactly the typical, vacuous teeny bopper flick.
And then I wonder if my own calculations on 21 grams were just - all wrong.
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