Naomi Watts as Cristina in “21 Grams” (2003)
So, there’s this woman, see, and she’s a recovering alcoholic with a supportive husband and two adorable moppet children, only they get killed in a hit and run by a reformed ex-con, and her husband’s heart gets transplanted into a dying man who’s estranged from his wife due to an abortion she never told him about. The dying man starts to stalk the widowed woman, they strike up a relationship and then she persuades him to try and kill the ex-con, but when they attempt murder, the dying man shoots himself and has to be taken to the hospital by the widow and ex-con. The same ex-con who killed her husband and whom she in turn, wanted to kill. If anything can convince you of the strength of Naomi Watts‘ wired, unraveling performance as the widowed Cristina, it has to be that the plot of “21 Grams,” when unkinked and laid out flat as above, is surely the most overwrought of Iñárritu’s career (and he is no stranger to extra turns of the screw). The performance requires every single weapon in her arsenal to keep up with the film’s elaborative narrative: from gentle, hopeful and contented to grief-riven and self-hating, to furious and vengeful, to all-out hysteria. But as classically “actory” as the part is, and as eyecatchingly showy —it was also Oscar nominated— Watts commitment to each of Cristina’s incarnations is thorough and frighteningly believable, making it seem natural that any woman who had gone through such a tragedy would inevitably try on new and different personalities like clothing. Or maybe suits of armor. And it also provides a crucial mooring point for Iñárritu’s non-linear storytelling, here stretched to its most confounding limits: it’s really only through understanding where Watts’ Cristina is on her journey that we can understand where we are in the story.
Adriana Barraza as Amelia in “Babel” (2006)
Along the multi-stranded journey of his ensemble and his Guillermo Arriaga-scripted triptych of features, Iñárritu gathered together something of a repertory of actors whom he used repeatedly, among them Emilio Echevarria, Gael Garcia Bernal and terrific Mexican actress Adriana Barraza. Barraza also shows up in “Amores Perros,” and more recently has been spotted in fellow Mexican Guillermo del Toro’s TV show “The Strain,” but her most substantial feature film role to date has been as the centerpiece of the US/Mexico strand of “Babel.” One of the most overtly sympathetic of the film’s characters, as the longtime nanny to the children of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s characters (both of whom turn in good performances, though oddly their parts feel the least well defined), Barraza plays the role with such warmth and down-to-earth practicality that when tragedy inevitably strikes, we feel it all the more. Again grounding what might otherwise be almost too much of a stretch to believe, Barraza sells the idea that all Amelia really does is make a series of perfectly sympathetic decisions that due to no fault of her own lead to dreadful outcomes. There is not-so-subtle social commentary in her character in that, as a Mexican illegal immigrant, it doesn’t matter that Amelia is probably motivated by much more decent and generous instincts than anyone else in the film. But the colossal injustice of fate, in tandem with the entrenched forces of the political status quo, will ensure that no matter what the crime is or who committed it, she’s the one who will pay. Iñárritu may not quite pull off the overarching idea that it’s Blanchett’s character who gets the bullet but Amelia is the martyr, but Barraza’s Oscar-nominated performance suggests that he doesn’t really need to: it’s good enough to shine as a movingly human portrayal of the immigrant experience all by itself.
