The soul survivors

When you set the bar with your first movie at such a height that most other filmmakers cannot even see it, let alone o'erleap it, expectations for the follow-up are unnaturally high. Thus it is with the Mexican director Alejandro Gonzaez Inrritu, whose Amores Perros was the most exciting debut in international cinema for a decade.

If his new film, shot in English, falls a little below his Spanish-language debut, it shows at least that he has evolved a stylistic identity and cinematic language uniquely his own.

Set in an unnamed city somewhere in Middle America, the film is constructed in much the same way as his earlier work; several characters of varying social backgrounds are brought together by a single traumatic event - once again, a car accident. A dying man, saved by a heart transplanted from a husband killed (together with his two children) by a hitandrun driver, teams up with the widow to hunt down the perpetrator.

The Biblical trilogy of guilt, vengeance and redemption drive the plot, and while coincidence and irony play their parts rather too liberally, there is no denying the absolute control Iñ·rritu has over his complex, multitiered screenplay and almost Dickensian panoply of characters.

The title refers to the alleged

weight lost by human beings when they die, which believers have taken to represent the weight of the soul. Consequently, the film is ripe with religious imagery from the character of Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro, never better), a former jailbird and criminal lowlife who has converted to Christianity, to the bleeding stigmata of wounds suffered by Sean Penn's heart-transplanted college professor, Paul Rivers. Hauled back into hospital, Rivers asks: "If I stay, will I be saved?" a question which resonates far beyond his corporeality.

In addition, enigmatic pregnancies affect two women, Mary Rivers (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and the newly-widowed Christina Peck (Naomi Watts). Iñ·rritu's technique is now firmly established; the handheld camera, the slightly abraded stock and the long, intimate close-ups located in a jungle of intercutting flashbacks and flashforwards, ellipses and reverses, which eventually subside to reveal the connections between the characters.

On the debit side, the script accumulates the baggage of melodrama which threatens to turn the film into an epic soap opera. And the reliance on a concluding voice-over to tie the thematic strands together is a miscalculation. Less feral and more contemplative than Amores Perros, 21 Grams has a less mythical reach but it retains a similar grasp on the unexpected strengths and frailties of human nature.