Character and Complexity in American Independent Cinema: 21 Grams and PassionFish

Michael Z. Newman

Since the early 1990s, films with complex narrative structures have been a mainstay of world cinema. Although such structures have been used in films of many eras and national contexts (e.g., The Cabinet of JDr Caligari (1919), Citizen Kane (1941), Rashomon (1950)), in recent years we undoubtedly have been experiencing a period of sustained interest in inventive forms of visual storytelling. Pulp Fiction (1994) is often seen as the progenitor of the trend that includes not only films with rearranged chronologies (The Limey [1999], Memento [2000]) but also simultaneously occurring parallel stories (Go [1999], Time (Code[2000]), stories of parallel universes (SlidingDoors [1998], Run Lola Run [1998]), and "network narratives" of large ensembles of characters (Magnolia [1999], Love Actually [2003]) (Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It). Most of these have pre-Pulp Fiction antecedents. The time-scrambling films hark back to modernist cinema, literature, and drama. The forking-paths stories of parallel events recall Jim Jarmusch and KrzysztofKieslowski. And the network narratives are descendents not only of classics such as Rules of the Game (1939) but also television dramas. In all instances, by offering something different from a plot unfolded in linear chronology, 89

these films incorporate novel narrative forms that seem to achieve an intrinsic aesthetic appeal. This strategy is part of the larger phenomenon of the rise of a full-fledged alternative and parallel mode of production and reception in the U.S. alongside the Hollywood mainstream. When we think of complex narratives such as those mentioned above we tend not to have in mind studio blockbusters, though such films sometimes do invert or rearrange their chronologies (e.g., by beginning at the end and telling the story in flashbacks, as has also become common in network television series). The recent phenomenon of complex narratives is rooted firmly in the alternative sphere of cinema, the films screened at festivals and art houses and seen on boutique cable television outlets such as IFC. These typically are either imports from abroad like Hong Sang-Soo's The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000) or off-Hollywood domestic productions like Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001). Independent cinema, which has supplanted foreign art cinema as the most prominent feature film alternative to Hollywood, offers appeals that are distinct from those of mainstream cinema. One of these is a formal complexity, an aesthetic play that some think is more sophisticated or engaging than what one finds in mainstream fare (King, Levy, Newman). Complexity of storytelling in the past two decades of American film is a function in large part of the increasing prominence of the independent cinema movement. There are many ways in which a film, a narrative, or any cultural artifact may be considered complex. In narrative films, character is one aspect that may be evaluated in terms of complexity, and character happens to be one quality that many of its champions and practitioners identify as central to the appeal of independent cinema. When asked to differentiate independent from mainstream films, critics and filmmakers alike often note that while Hollywood movies tend to emphasize plot above all else, indie films are generally more character-driven. 1 Since a narrative may be complex in many different ways, it bears asking: do films with complex story/plot structures also have other kinds of complexity such as complexity of character? Does the formal sophistication of complex films extend to aspects of storytelling other than spatio-temporal design? Or could it be the reverse, that complex plot structures are inimical to complex characterizations? In the pages to follow, my goal is to probe these questions by comparing two independent films with highly contrasting 90

expository styles: John Sayles's PassionFish (1992) and Alejandro Gonzalez Ifiarittu's 21 Grams (2001). Both are dramas about intersections among people of different backgrounds and experiences, both are intensely emotional, and both are thematically rich. But while PassionFish follows a rather straightforward, linear model of spatiotemporal representation, 21 Grams is structured as a confusing jumble of flashbacks and flashforwards that comes together as a coherent story only in the end and possibly only in the viewer's mind. I hope to show through this comparison that character complexity is independent of plot complexity, and that it is possible that the complexity gained through temporal reordering may even come at the cost of complex characterization. Expository Modes Passion Fish begins with May-Alice (Mary McDonnell), a television actress recovering from an accident that has left her paraplegic. Following a period of frustrating rehab, she moves from New York to rural Louisiana to live in her family's old house. MayAlice is attended there by a series of nurses, each seemingly more irritating than the last, until a taciturn black woman named Chantelle (Alfre Woodard), who comes determined to succeed at her job, begins to match her will to May-Alice's. This set-up plays out over several scenes of between a few seconds' and a few minutes' duration, one following the other in strict linear chronology and consuming the first twenty minutes of a film that unfolds at a deliberate, quiet pace. A third important character, a horsetrainer and romantic interest for Chantelle named Sugar LeDoux (Vondie Curtis Hall), is introduced more than twenty-five minutes into the film and a fourth, a married fisherman and romantic interest for May-Alice named Rennie (David Strathairn), first appears a few minutes after that. The opening half hour of the film is an introductory act in which the main characters are introduced and the relationships among them are established. By contrast, 21 Grams begins with a fusillade of short, disconnected scenes. None of these introduces the characters by name or occupation. 1. A couple are together in a bedroom, the man (Sean Penn) sitting on the bed and the woman (Naomi Watts) lying down asleep, both of them undressed (20 seconds). 91

2. A different man and his two young daughters prepare to leave a restaurant (21 seconds). 3. The woman from #1 talks about her family in a group setting, seemingly a therapy session orAlcoholics Anonymous meeting (27 seconds). 4. Another man (Benicio Del Toro) sternly lectures a teenage boy across a table in a church rec hall; then they step outside and the man shows the boy his truck, emblazoned "Faith" across its rear end, which he says Jesus gave him (3 minutes 23 seconds). 5. Birds fly over a building at dusk (16 seconds). 6. The man from #1 lies in a hospital bed with a respirator tube in his mouth; his voice-over says, "This is death's waiting room" (I minute). 7. The woman from #1 and #3, seemingly strung out and desperate, snorts cocaine in a dingy bathroom (35 seconds). 8. A woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is undergoing a gynecological exam; then in her doctor's office she says she wants to try to become pregnant with her dying husband's child via artificial insemination (1 minute 16 seconds). Although these snippets might be interpreted as hinting at connections among these events, such as a link between the family in #2 and the woman in #3 and between the dying man in #6 and the woman who wants her dying husband's baby in #8, the film offers no clear indication of a causal or temporal relation among any of the eight moments depicted. Indeed the woman in #3 is also the woman in # 1, so it might be reasonable to wonder whether her husband is the man in #1. And although the characters in #2 and #3 and in #6 and #8 are related to each other by marriage, we learn only much later that the chronology of the scenes is reversed, that #3 precedes #2 and that #8 precedes #6 in the story's temporal sequence. Only two of the eight scenes, #5 and #6, follow each other in direct chronology, but the consecutiveness of these two scenes is actually not established until the very end of the film. (The actual order of the scenes in the chronology of the story, as we unravel it by the end of the film, is 3/4/8, 2, 7/1, 5, 6.) Rather than spreading them out in a neat array, 21 Grams demands that its audience actively puzzle out the connections that will 92

eventually be revealed among its characters and events. Watching for the first time, one simply cannot say whether the events of the opening scenes are supposed to happen in a linear temporal sequence or not. It would seem likely that they are not, but as we watch, this is just a hunch. Even if they could be chronologically consecutive, it would seem certain that many significant events in interstices between scenes have been skipped. In general 21 Grams's opening sequence is geared toward an effect not of clarity but of confusion and uncertainty. If the film intrigues and captivates its audience, it does so by creating enigmas that it implicitly promises to explain only much later on. The pleasure in watching, to a large extent, is the pleasure of working out explanations for how people and events are connected. This activity is quite different from the experience Passion Fish offers. It is not that Passion Fish lacks formal sophistication or artistry, or that PassionFish has no narrative enigmas of its own. But unlike 21 Grams, PassionFish is not the kind of filn that makes its audience puzzle out its story moment by moment. The spectator watching the opening scenes of 21 Grams asks, What is going on? The spectator watching the opening scenes of PassionFish is shown much of what is going on and is free to think about the characters, settings, and themes in more detail and with more intensity, to consider the implications of what is going on and look forward to future narrative events. If we may think of the narrative text as having a discursive level separate from its content-a dichotomy that may not withstand theoretical scrutiny but that is nonetheless useful as a heuristic-then 21 Gramsthrows us on the mercy of the narration in a way that Passion Fish does not. 21 Grams has a surface of impenetrability that makes PassionFish comparatively transparent. Thus the differences between these two openings, these two approaches to cinematic storytelling, are matters not only of subject matter and pacing but also of patterns of exposition, the way a film's narration parcels out information about the diegesis. A plot may reorder events of a story in infinite ways; by making the plot so twisted and jumbled, the narration of 21 Grams makes the process of piecing together the story unusually difficult. At many points we have to wonder why the characters are behaving as they are, how they arrived at such depths of despair. Explanatory coherence is deferred. Narration is the factor that most makes 21 Gramsseem complex as it unfolds and PassionFish less so. The narration in 21 Grams does 93

not initially make use of a concentrated expository sequence; rather than having any such thing, the film keeps jumping forward in time to scenes from the middle and end of the story. While our expectation is to begin a narrative with some semblance of a "setup," complex films like 21 Grams often go in the opposite direction, offering in place of a neatly laid out situation a mess of disjointed fragments. This expository mode might encourage spectators to formulate inferences about the characters and narrative events and hypotheses about where the film might be going, but does not make clear how the different pieces fit together according to schemes of time or causation. And yet one senses while watching 21 Grams that order is around the corner, that the narration has carefully selected and ordered the events to produce certain effects and that the "a ha!" moment when things fall into place will be all the more satisfying after a run-up of anticipation and excitement. 21 Grams is a film trying to surprise its audience in an unconventional way, not merely by making it wonder what will happen but also by making it wonder how the various events that have already been shown to have happened will add up. Only by presenting the plot so playfully can this kind of anticipatory effect really work. The key element in 21 Grams's narration is withholding. A narration so stingy with clarifying explanatory cues and so promiscuous with merely suggestive, contradictory, and provocative ones makes following it a challenge. Chronology and causality are by nature linear, proceeding from effect to cause to effect to cause, from point A to B to C to D. By the end of 21 Grams and other time-scrambled films such as Pulp Fiction and Memento the events of the story have been revealed in such a way that they can all be placed in their context in a linear order conforming to the patterns of action and reaction that we know from both everyday life and narrative schemas.' But while it is going on, especially in its introductory sequences, the narration of a time-scrambled film like 21 Grams frustrates spectators' efforts to make these connections. For a time, the text resists its readers' desire for it to cohere and their cognitive effort to make it so. Narration in this case is the opposite of what we think of as classical, i.e., selfeffacing and unobtrusive. In 21 Grams, the narration is prominent to the point of drawing attention away from the story and directing it to the process of its telling. Narrational complexity is not, however, the only kind. This comparison suggests the importance of thinking of complexity in (at 94

least) two distinct senses. There is the complexity of the expository mode, the complexity of narration as a process of introducing and clarifying details of the narrative world. According to this sense, Passion Fish seems less complex because of its expository linearity and its general clarity, though this becomes less true of the film as it progresses and offers up some surprises, as I shall show. But another kind of complexity is of the narrative itself rather than its mode of presentation in a plot structure. Some films have narration that is more complex than the narrative. Go, which conveys a cluster of fairly straightforward stories through its convoluted narration, might be such a case. In other films, a straightforward narration conveys a complex narrative, as I am arguing is the case of PassionFish. Films in a realist mode such as Bicycle Thieves (1947) and PatherPanchali(1955) are often praised for their thematic complexity even with narrations that are quite restrained and uncomplicated next to the likes of 21 Grams. Of course, a film may have a narrative and narration neither of which are complex, as in a very simple story like G. A. Smith's As Seen Through a TLiescope (1900), or a narrative and narration both of which are complex, as in modernist films like Persona(1966). (See figure 1 below.) If recent independent cinema is to be considered complex, it would pay to consider ways in which it has complexity not only in story/plot structures but also in terms of other storytelling values like character. Figure 1 Complexity: Narrative vs. Narration Straightforward Narrative

Complex Narrative

Straightforward

Simple stories, e.g.,

Realist narratives,

Narration

As Seen Through a

e.g., Bicycle 7hieves

Complex Narration

TrLI'scopeSome temporally complex narratives,

Modernist narratives, e.g.,

e.g., Go

Persona

In the opening scene of PassionFish, May-Alice is introduced in her hospital bed watching a soap opera on television, and in short order we are shown that she is watching the show she used to star in, watching the actress who has been newly cast in her role. By introducing her as a soap actress, Sayles gives us a clear standard by which to measure the character and the narrative: that of domestic melodrama. 95

Sayles sets up a scenario familiar from many television programs and movies, the victim of disease or injury faced with the burden and challenge of recovery. But as is typical of Sayles in particular and of independent cinema in general, PassionFish systematically subverts its generic and character-based expectations, refusing to fit into the standard format of the disease-of-the-week recovery narrative with its virtuous heroines and tear-jerking moments. For instance, MayAlice has a series of reactions and expressions over the first twenty minutes of Passion Fish that begin to establish her character. MayAlice is sarcastic, angry, and cold, coarse and foul-mouthed, treating everyone unpleasantly. She wallows in self-pity. She suffers not with virtuous determination or serenity, but with obnoxious ill humor. The narrative sets her no very specific time-focused goals to pursue or obstacles to overcome, no event to look forward to or relationship worth maintaining. The pacing is slow and the character's gains are minimal at best. She goes through nurse after nurse, mistreating them (the film suggests) until they quit. The film struggles, it seems, to deny its audience the experience of an illness-melodrama's affective terrain. It insists on a kind of socially engaged realism, a style distinctive of many American independent filmmakers, in place of the trappings of mainstream genre storytelling. When Chantelle arrives May-Alice is no kinder to her than she has been to the others, but Chantelle seems more determined than they are to succeed at her job. Chantelle is black and May-Alice is white, and Chantelle would seem to be poor while May-Alice would seem to be rich. Chantelle is stoical and quiet, and she seems to be possessed of some mysterious force of will to take on May-Alice and stand up to her recalcitrance. And yet there also seems within Chantelle to be a certain vulnerability, a neediness that she represses so that she can go about her job. The interaction between the women is established as that of nurse-patient and black-white and this comes with a set of expectations just as the disease-and-recovery scenario does. It presents itself as a story of racial tension and understanding. So the themes of the relationship between the women are overlaid on the themes of the recovery scenario which adds to the complexity. But the drama has yet another layer: while May-Alice's situation is clarified quite well in the opening expository scenes, Chantelle's is withheld. Unlike 21 Grams, however, Passion Fish makes no show of this withholding, and thus the film's narration does 96

not generate the effects of frustrated comprehension and anticipation of explanatory coherence that a more complex expository style would. Chantelle has a backstory, a history, that the narration suppresses as a gap, only to reveal it, to fill it in, in the middle of the filn. Her secret, revealed when her ex-husband and then her father come to visit much later on than the scenes I have described, is that she is also in recovery-from drug addiction-and that she has a child, a daughter who is being raised in Chicago by her grandparents. When we meet her father, a physician, we also realize that Chantelle is of equal class status as May-Alice, that our assumption about her being poor was incorrect. By reversing our expectations, by having the characters surprise us, Sayles forces us to reconsider the way we have typed Chantelle from the start, the racial and class assumptions we have applied to her. This revelation is also a trick of narration, but it has not nearly as intrusive or flashy an effect as those we find in 21 Grams. The information about Chantelle is a suppressed gap. Narrative gaps may be flaunted or suppressed, i.e., they can be made known to the audience or they can be kept secret (Bordwell, Narration in the Fi7ction Film 54-57). The former technique typically creates suspense as the spectator actively seeks out information that will fill the gap. And the latter, as in this case, typically creates surprise. The narration of PassionFish has not been reminding us that Chantelle has a secret, as a more conventional melodrama might. But by having the character surprise us, the film provides more of a sense of her roundness and complexity. We are able to recontextualize her struggles to help May-Alice and keep her job as we know more about her goals, and we are able to appreciate her journey from addiction to recovery in light of the characteristics we have come to appreciate in her. Sayles's choice to suppress and then reveal this information demonstrates a different kind of expository style from IfiMrritu's, but even in its simplicity and restraint the effect is one of intensifying the complexity of the story, its characters, and themes. Middles Eventually 21 Grams does establish something like a basic scenario into which viewers can fit information. The man and woman in #1 are Paul and Christine, a couple that we know is going to have a romantic relationship. Christine is initially married to the man with the girls in #2. The man in #4 is Jack, a recently devout Christian, 97

family man, and ex-convict struggling to make ends meet. And the woman in #8 is indeed Paul's wife. Paul is desperately in need of a heart transplant to save his life. All of this is made clear by about fifteen minutes into the movie. At seventeen minutes we see Paul recovering from a heart transplant just after we see Christine, drinking and looking haggard, clutching bloody clothes to her chest as she stands over a washing machine. The pieces are now coming together. Throughout its first half, the film also offers several glimpses of the future, flashforwards to scenes of Paul courting Christine, Paul and Christine together, and Christine telling Paul that they have to kill someone. And fourteen minutes into the film we see a very confusing scene in which Christine, Paul, and Jack are all in a hotel room and Paul has been wounded by a gunshot. At this point it is still hard to place these moments in a linear chronology. This scene of the three main characters together would seem to be a flashforward, but this is not clearly established. Paul's condition intensifies the ambiguity: is he in the hospital in the beginning because of his failing heart or because of his gunshot wound? Is his wounding somehow related to his illness? What is Jack's connection to Paul and Christine? And why is Paul pursuing her? All of these remain mysteries. Even as the film reveals its narrative givens bit by bit, it also intensifies the suspense around them. Then half an hour into the film, the biggest question is answered. We find out what connects the characters. Paul is waiting for a heart transplant. Jack accidentally runs over a man and his daughters. The man is Christine's husband. His heart goes to Paul, saves Paul's life. And so for the first time, the audience is given some relief from its constant puzzlement. From this point forward, the activity of watching the film becomes more conventional. Yes, we still see occasional flashbacks and flashforwards, but the narrative takes a turn for the linear around this time. Many questions about the characters' motivations still remain open-many "how" questions in addition to "who" and "what" questions. But many of the questions posed in the beginning are now answered. We know what drives Christine to drink and take drugs, we know a likely context for Paul's relationship with her, we know a reason she would want to kill Jack. The details of the rest of the film still must be revealed, but the shape of the narrative is clarified. At this point, in other words, the film becomes less complex. 98

PassionFish Courtesy: Photofest

21 Grams Courtesy: Photofest

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This analysis also reveals that although the narration flaunts its gaps from the start, and although it is temporally disjunctive rather than linear, the narrative does eventually take the form of a forwardthrusting progression of events. The film can easily be segmented into a standard three-act pattern: the first act takes us to the accident and the events surrounding it; the second act is about Jack's descent into a personal hell following his crime and Paul and Christine's slowly blossoming relationship; and the final act is about Paul and Christine's plot to kill Jack, a series of events that culminate in a twist that should not be terribly surprising given all that the narrative has offered up in advance. Even with all of its temporal manipulations, the movie has the design of a canonical narrative: an initial state of affairs, a disruption, a conflict and its development, and an eventual resolution. It moves from effect to cause to effect to cause, though with digressions along the way and more confusion and puzzling than is typical of classical cinema. But ultimately, the complexity 21 Grams offers is a function more of its expository sequences than its characters or thematic material. By the middle of the film it has taken the form and content of a melodrama, a story of sensational violence, of extremes of emotion, of conflicts of life and death, and of questions of moral clarity or obscurity. It has excesses of irony. The reformed Christian, Jack, is the one who does wrong while the disbelieving scientist, Paul (a mathematics professor, we learn late in the film) is the beneficiary of the greatest gift. And the man who comes to take Christine out of her depression has her dead husband's heart, although at first she does not know it. When eventually she finds out and they make love, he says to her, "You can trust me, I have a good heart." If the performers were not so convincing in their emotional displays, if the story were not so overwhelming in its emotional rhetoric, it might be tempting to dismiss all of this as corny. It would also be much more tempting to do so if the plot were more linear, if the film presented itself as a more conventional melodrama rather than an experimental, complex, indie film narrative. The sophistication of the storytelling functions as a screen behind which the rather unsophisticated story material is hidden for the first part of the film, so that the audience is intrigued and drawn in before it knows what the story is really like. The effect eventually is to be awed by the way the plot works itself out and to be moved by the life-and-death struggles of the characters. But the surface of confusion is penetrated a third of the way through. 100

What happens in PassionFish is quite the reverse of 21 Grams. Rather than seeing its complexity unravel as the film progresses, PassionFish becomes more and more compelling as we slowly learn new things about the characters and see them from new perspectives. Much of this process depends on ways in which we understand characters as belonging to types or categories, not necessarily flat genre types but any kind of social or narrative category we might use to make sense of a character. In PassionFish,the relationship between the two main characters is established early as one of caregiver and care recipient, nurse and patient. The audience expects that Chantelle will help May-Alice rehabilitate and learn to get along in the world without the use of her legs. At the same time, May-Alice is the employer and Chantelle is the employee. We expect Chantelle to try to satisfy MayAlice and to heed her wishes. And while May-Alice-is a white woman of independent means, Chantelle is African American and has to work for a living. We also expect their racial and class differences to come into play. As the film progresses, Sayles begins to overlay additional types to our understanding of the characters and also begins to have the characters defy their established typing. As the film progresses, we come to see that Chantelle is also undergoing a process of recovery and that May-Alice is helping her, giving her an opportunity to grow into herself We come to see the characters as each other's friends, too. And we are also introduced to more elements of May-Alice's backstory, her history, that shed light on the present. In any good story, some expectations are met and others are not. The characters in independent cinema are often more surprising than those in Hollywood films. They may have more contradictory traits or more complex combinations of traits. This frustrates the process of typing but also adds interest to it. PassionFish is a fine example of this tendency. The central trajectory of the main characters' relationship is a narrative of reversal: at first Chantelle takes care of May-Alice, then it becomes apparent that May-Alice is also taking care of Chantelle, and that she is strongly committed to being Chantelle's friend and helper. This reversal is the product of the narrative's most important surprise: we learn that Chantelle is recovering from drug addiction and that she has a daughter who has been taken from her custody. Keeping her job and succeeding at it are crucial for Chantelle's recovery. She needs to prove that she is responsible and reliable to get her child back. Thus a parallel is established among the women's traits that transcends their 101

typing and brings them closer: both are addicts, both have suffered through life-changing traumas, and neither can afford to fail at recovery. Essentially, the more we learn about the characters, the more we see them as multidimensional and contradictory. Characterization in PassionFish is not an additive process of accreting traits and types, but a transformational process wherein each new type introduced can effect a reshaping of the character, a new conception and understanding of her. In the first half of the film, May-Alice takes on more types as we observe more behavior and meet more secondary characters: alcoholic, amateur photographer, old friend, colleague, potential romantic partner. Some of these new type categories stand in a contradictory relationship to other, earlier established ones. Her romantic relationship with Rennie is unexpected given her inability to experience sexual pleasure and her earlier, angry statements about this. Her photography is represented as a creative outlet that replaces her soap acting, which in contrast seems less personal. She begins to make peace with her Cajun roots, which she had earlier tried hard to repress and forget. Instead of having no family, she begins to perceive Rennie and Chantelle as a surrogate family. May-Alice's recovery arc is a reversal, substituting types given a positive valence for negative ones. Chantelle's characteristics are based on a different constellation of type categories, the reverse of May-Alice's: a working black woman. We assume that she has no significant other and no children because none are referenced in any dialogue and none appear at the house. When she begins a romantic relationship with Sugar LeDoux, it seems clear that although Chantelle is single and available, she is very wary of becoming involved with anyone. But then her ex-husband appears, and then her father and daughter. Delayed exposition surprises us because our hypotheses are built on stereotypes. We learn that she is a recovering addict, a daughter, a mother. We learn that she grew up well off, not poor, in Chicago. Chantelle's recovery arc is one of admissions and revelations, a coming to terms with who she is. Characterization in Passion Fish relies on a strategic order of exposition for its effects. The first information that a film gives us about a character biases our interpretation of all of the subsequent information, a phenomenon known as the "primacy effect" (Sternberg 93ff., Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film 38, 56). The primacy 102

effect emphasizes certain type assignations, but later on a "recency effect" balances the primacy effect by demanding a revision of our assessment of the characters (Sternberg, Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film). Sayles saves May-Alice's creative and romantic characteristics for later in the film, instead beginning with her as an angry accident victim who has to give up a career and a busy life in New York for an isolated one in Louisiana. Her only interpersonal relations are with members of the health care professions. With Chantelle, Sayles employs a different approach, saving her most personal material, her own trauma, for later in the film. The effect is to put Chantelle on equal footing with May-Alice in terms both of suffering and of recovery, but to save this symmetry for the latter part of the film. By making this character symmetry surprising, the film amplifies its complexity as it progresses. For each of the main characters, a relationship could derail or spur her recovery, and so each approaches her male counterpart with a combination of desire and trepidation. This attitude reinforces the parallel between the main characters, and this parallelism becomes one of the film's central tropes. It surprises us by shifting from the asymmetry of nurse/patient into the symmetry of two characters who are both undergoing recovery, two women who are both ambivalent about their past and anxious about their future. As well, it is significant that the film ends with the women together, but without closure in the romance sub-plots. Another way of building up more complex characterization besides increasing information and reversing assumed types is by the introduction of minor characters. In Passion Fish as in many films, one function of secondary characters is to refine and clarify the characterization of the leads. When May-Alice's old friends come to visit, we see a glimpse of the milieu of her upbringing. She is much less "Southern" in her accent and mannerisms, and she relates to Chantelle in a much less patronizing way (the old friends assume her to be a servant), suggesting that racial prejudice was a problem among local whites that May-Alice either avoided or overcame. A similar comparison occurs when May-Alice's former colleagues from the television show visit. We notice how she is one of the actresses, sharing their camaraderie but a bit bitter over her part being taken by someone else. This sequence also affords the opportunity to compare Chantelle with Dawn (Angela Bassett), an African American woman 103

of roughly her age, who also grew up in Chicago. We learn here that Chantelle grew up better off than Dawn, which sparks our curiosity about how she wound up working as a nurse so far from home. Then when Chantelle's father and daughter arrive, we have yet more glimpses into her life before she became May-Alice's nurse. The narration of Passion Fish may be linear in the sense of having no flashbacks or flashforwards, no repeated or elided scenes, but by delaying these expository details of the characters' lives before the beginning of the plot, Sayles is able to layer complexity into his storytelling bit by bit throughout the film. The contrast with 21 Grams should be clear. A narrative that starts out in confusion is most likely to become clearer, less problematic. But a narrative that starts out simple has the opportunity of developing in the direction of intensified interest, of accumulating sophistication. Although both films deal with fairly conventional dramatic building blocks, Passion Fish surprises us with the means by which it arranges them. Its complexity is a function not of novelty and experimentalism, but of a more traditional kind of engaging storytelling using multi-dimensional, contradictory characters and an approach to revealing their traits that best exploits their qualities for the audience's experience. Endings 21 Grams ends by answering all of the questions it raises. It ends by decomplexifying its narration, by explaining all. It even explains the film's title as Paul speaks in a voice-over, picking up where he had left off in the introductory scenes, about how each human being supposedly loses 21 grams when he or she dies. In a film suffused with death, this universalizing statement ties all of the characters together in their shared humanity and mortality. To arrive at this moment, Paul and Christine have pursued Jack to try to kill him, but Paul is unable to pull the trigger and eventually turns the gun on himself His suicide is a surprise, but his death does not come as a shock; we already knew that his heart-Christine's husband's heart--was going to give out, and we knew from the beginning that he was likely to die. The surprise of the ending, actually, is that Christine is pregnant with Paul's baby. In general, 21 Grams resolves its plot with remarkable clarity and tidiness: Paul is dead; Jack tries to take the rap for his death but is released from police custody for lack of evidence; Christine and Marianne, Paul's ex-wife, are both presumably going to bear Paul's 104

children. No lingering questions or loose ends remain as the film concludes. The narration that began with so many questions ends with considerable closure. We even have the satisfaction, moments before Paul dies and the film ends, of seeing Christine in her dead daughter's room, which previously she had been unable to enter, coming to terms with her loss. By contrast, Passion Fish concludes not with answers but with questions. At the end the women realize how much they need each other, how May-Alice has been helping Chantelle recover just as Chantelle has been helping her. They have become each other's surrogate family. But questions about their romantic liaisons are left dangling as are questions about May-Alice's professional future and Chantelle's eventual reunion with her daughter. Sayles prefers to provoke and inquire rather than to leave things neat and tidy, and as the clich6 about art cinema in the 1960s so aptly put it, his are the kind of movies that make you think. This is not just to praise their aesthetic virtues but, more importantly, to signal a mode of interaction that they demand of their audience. 21 Grams makes unusual cognitive demands as it unfolds, as it makes itself difficult to understand initially. But PassionFish makes you think when it ends. It challenges its audience to see itself in the characters, to look beyond appearances, to believe in the power of friendship and human interconnectedness. Its complexity is earned through rather more old-fashioned means of thematic richness, bold characterizations, and understated but carefully revelatory narration. But its appeal as a character-driven independent film is no less for this. Narrative complexity comes in many varieties. Notes 'Sofia Coppola boasts of her film Lost in Translation,"The story has no plot." (Kaufman). John Pierson, a representative for independent filmmakers, notes, "Many of the trendsetting independent films, including some I've been involved in myself, have championed the idea of the character-driven movie." (Fuller). John Sayles observes that his films "tend to be about characters." (Dreyfus). Mark Gill, who was director of marketing at independent distributor Miramax in the 1990s declared, "Miramax films tend to be more stimulating, more character-driven." (Hellmore). Jim Hillier discusses American independent films as the re-emergence of anAmerican film aesthetic of 105

the 1960s and 1970s, exemplified in films such as Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, Two-Lane Blacktop, and M*A *S*H which "are frequently led more by character than plot." (Hillier viii). I This is not so in some films; films such as Personaand Last Year at Marienbadfrustrate comprehension more fundamentally than any of my examples, but they are highly exceptional cases. I In an interview, Sayles confirmed this reading of Passion Fish as taking a soap-opera situation but treating it a way that would defy the audience's genre expectations (Johnson).

Works Cited Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988). . The Way Hollywood Tells It: Style and Story in Modern Movies (Berkeley: U of California P, 2006). Dreyfus, Claudia. "John Sayles," Progressive 55.11 (1991), 30-33. Fuller, Graham. "Summer Movies: Indies" New York Times 5/2/99, sec. 2A, 44. Helmore, Edward. "Fast Forward From Art House to Your House," The Observer 9/7/97, p. 12. Hillier, Jim (ed.), American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI, 2001). Johnson, Trevor. "Sayles Talk" in Hillier (ed.), 215-219. Kaufman, Anthony. "The Indie Edge," Daily Variety 12/18/03, Special Section 1, AI. King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005). Levy, Emmanuel. Cinema of Outsiders (New York: New York UP, 1999). Newman, Michael. Characterizationin American Independent Cinema (PhD diss, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005). Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978).

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