Product Description

The emotionally and physically charged lives of three people, a college professor (Sean Penn), an ex-con (Benicio Del Toro) and a young mother with a reckless past (Naomi Watts), collide unexpectedly in this gripping suspense thriller.

Fate brought them together. Now vengeance will take them to the heights of love, the depths of revenge and the promise of redemption. Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts give the finest performances of their careers in the film that is "tantalizingly alive!" - Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11569 in DVD
• Brand: Universal Studios
• Released on: 2004-03-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 124 minutes

Amazon.com
Sean Penn and Benecio Del Toro, two of the most gripping actors around, play wildly different men linked through a grieving woman (Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive, The Ring) in 21 Grams. Del Toro (Traffic, The Usual Suspects) delves deep into the role of an ex-con turned born-again Christian, a deeply conflicted man struggling to set right a terrible accident, even at the expense of his family. Penn (Mystic River, Dead Man Walking) captures a cynical, philandering professor in dire need of a heart transplant, which he gets from the death of Watts' husband. 21 Grams slips back in forth in time, creating an intricate emotional web out of the past and the present that slowly draws these three together; the result is remarkably fluid and compelling. The movie overreaches for metaphors towards the end, but that doesn't erase the power of the deeply felt performances. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
Tony Wilson, the Manchester music impresario who founded Factory records in the late seventies-home to Joy Division (later New Order) and Happy Mondays, among others-gets a fevered tribute in Michael Winterbottom's blast of a film. Wilson is played with a brilliant élan by British comic Steve Coogan-a standout performance that captures the dour enthusiasm of Wilson's genius. And Winterbottom's casting of the myriad musician roles is flawless; there isn't a hair style or a body type that seems out of place. The film's direction has the jittery anarchic feel of a good punk song, and the script displays a fast and free humor that indulges in the excesses of a rock-and-roll life. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Life, Death and Redemption.
This is a hard film to see and understand, nevertheless is outstanding and deserves to be seen.
Film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has developed a complex, tasty and compromised "film d'art". We may trace different stylistic influences on this movie: Quentin Tarantino's (Pulp Friction) non linear time sequence and some touches of Kieslowski's (The Double Life of Veronique) casual but most meaningful encounters between different characters.
Inarritu transforms an ordinary everyday issue in a strange, tangled and puzzling drama.

The story is as follows: there is a sick mathematician waiting for a heart transplant as last resort to survive; there is an ex-con trying to make a new clean life for him and his family; there is a family father taking care of his daughters. Tragedy and fate reunite all these elements into a griping tale.

Main actress and actors in the film perform greatly.
Sean Penn, as the feeble hearted mathematician, is able to express and transmit the anguish of nearly dying man. Afterwards he shows the compulsive need to find who his donor was.
Benicio Del Toro, as the ex-con, presents a very convincing mask of a tormented man trying to overcome his addictions and drawbacks in order to have a new opportunity.
Last but not least, Naomi Watts, as the widow of the donor, gives a performance full of subtleties.

Viewing this movie in DVD gives the unique opportunity to go back to previous scene when you get lost.
A tasty dish for movie fans. Enjoy!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.

Like a grisly roadside accident...we couldn't look away
We watched 21 Grams last night.

To counteract the severely intense, tragic film we watched Leno's monolog about half-way through and, after the movie was over, Seinfeld Season Five's "The Marine Biologist." Even with humor during and after, we still went to bed feeling depressed.

This is not a film for the faint of heart (or even faint of mind). It requires one to suspend all hope and pay attention to the slow, choppy unfolding of the story.

As others have noted, this film unravels in a distinctly non-linear fashion -- story lines overlapping, backing up, coming at you from the past (or the future - hard to say which), all interspersed to tell the tale of three couples whose lives intersect in tragic, unexpected ways. (Remember Memento? This film owes a lot to that ground-breaking effort.)

Death, drugs, tragedy, sex, hopelessnes, spiritual and emotional devastation -- all these themes and images are pounded into the viewer from people whose lives have forever fallen apart.

Sean Penn is riveting, as usual. But so are Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts (who, I think, turned in the performance of her career).

All I could think about while I watched the movie was this: Life turns on a dime. At any given moment, my life could take a turn like the lives of these characters. Many lives take that turn every single day, and the downward spiral begins. That fear of sudden devastation chilled me to the bone the whole time I watched film. So, in effect, even though this isn't a traditional thriller or horror movie, it still scared the hell out of me.

I'm not sure this is the kind of movie I'll be able to watch again. But I'm definitely sure it's one I'll never be able to forget.

Great performances wasted in 21 Grams
21 Grams is a film you want to like because the acting is so good. Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Naomi Watts are all at their best and their best is wonderful to watch. Unfortunately, director Alejandro Inarritu lets his experiments in filmmaking get in the way of the work of his talented cast.

At the heart of this story is a traffic accident. Del Toro, an ex-con who has found Jesus, turns a corner on a busy street with his truck and kills a father and his two daughters. Instead of stopping as Jesus would have done, he drives on and tells his wife of the accident. She urges him not to go to the police and goes out and wipes away all evidence of the tragedy. This retelling of the story is accurate, but the viwer only learns about it in bits and pieces. Inarritu plays fast and loose with our conceptions of time and story telling and in the process, will lose all but the most dedicated movie goers, as is evidenced by the many unfavorable reviews on Amazon.com.

The performances of the entire cast were good enough to keep me watching closely until the final credits. We have to work at piecing the entire story together and it makes the two hour film seem much longer. For this reason I think Inarritu's experiment has failed. Instead of tantalizing us with bits and pieces of the story line, he antagonizes us. It seems as if he has turned a tragedy into a jigsaw puzzle. It was no fun putting this puzzle together. The film adds up to 21 Grams, not enough weight to justify two hours of our concerted effort playing hide and seek with the director.

On the plus side, is there a better actor working in films today than Benicio Del Toro? Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are also at the very top of their game. Some viewers will enjoy the film just to watch great acting. Others may find Inarritu's experiments with filmmaking fascinating. The rest are going to be very unhappy they attempted to take the measure of 21 Grams.