Network Narratives

Understanding and enjoying network narratives (such as Babel, 21 Grams, and several Altman films) depends not on how complex or how out-of-order the plotting is, but rather on when the information that will lead the viewer to piece together a coherent linear story is doled out.

While watching 21 Grams, I assumed that the reveal (the part that lets us know how everything fits together) would be at the end. Instead, it comes gradually around 30-40 minutes in, and without much fanfare.

Generally, we're told how the pieces all fit when the narration reveals a crucial cause-effect relationship between certain scenes. Until we get that crucial linking scene, we treat the film as a puzzle. We can't become fully immersed in the film because we're too busy trying to figure it all out. That's generally how I felt about Babel. It kept me at a distance, and the payoff wasn't worth the trouble.

By revealing this crucial piece of the puzzle earlier than some network narratives, 21 Grams is less of a puzzle or a stunt and more of a clever way of getting us not to choose sides, a way of making more than one character sympathetic, which under normal, linear plotting circumstances, may be impossible.

After the moment we learn how the puzzle fits together, we're concerned with when certain characters will find out information that we know but they don't know (Naomi Watts finds out that Sean Penn's character has her dead husband's heart at 1:28 or so) and what chain of events will lead to the the events we see throughout the film - like a mystery - (Sean Penn getting shot in the chest after hunting down Benicio Del Toro), and also what will happen to the characters in the end, which is what we're generally concerned with when we watch any movie.

That said, this movie revels a bit too much in its poignancy for me, and 21 Grams has to be the most misleading title for a movie I've heard in awhile. It sounds drug-related.