In this film about fate, predestination, forgiveness, and suchlike, directed by the talented Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, three people's lives are connected and destroyed by a tragic car accident, much like in his first film, the exceptional Amores Perros. Sean Penn plays Paul Rivers, a mathematician with a bad heart. Naomi Watts plays Christina Peck, a once and future drug addict with two beautiful daughters and a handsome husband. Benicio Del Toro plays Jack Jordan, a once and future convict who found and lost his salvation in bible-thumping storefront Christianity. Since the way their lives tie together is the big secret of the film, I won't go much into their connections.

During a vertiginous opening act when we are served snippets of scenes without understanding where they fall on the film's timeline, we learn a few things about them. Penn will end up sleeping with Watts, although he's married to Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who wants to have his child and is willing to be a single mother after he dies. Del Toro will wind up in prison again, estranged from his patient wife Marianne (Melissa Leo). Watts will return to her drug addiction. And the three characters will wind up in a trashy hotel room together, covered in blood. How and why these events occur I will leave to you to find out.

The big question is, would the movie have been better if Inarritu had let the events play out in chronological order? Sometimes fractured storylines like this one enhance a movie, like in Memento, which wouldn't have been nearly as fascinating if told in a linear way. However, while the staccato pace of the first third of this film was absolutely brilliant, by the end of the film, it seemed like it was spinning its wheels. I found myself irritated by the structure once I figured out where the movie was going. Scenes that would be important in a linear film become unimportant if they're just telling you what you already have figured out. In Inarritu's previous film, Amores Perros, he used a fragmented storyline, but he was careful to keep scenes in context. Here, the structure serves up sound bites, not scenes, and we are left to rearrange them in our heads.

Also, this is an actors' film, and the fragmentation takes away from the power of the performances. Naomi Watts gives the performance of a lifetime, but there's no continuity to it. It's just little islands of brilliance, devoid of context, cause, and effect. It is not the same thing to figure out long after the fact why someone is weeping, for example. When it's separated from what came before and what follows, we are left without the emotional impact of the scene, because performances build on themselves. Instead of being an emotional exercise, it becomes an intellectual one.

So Naomi Watts and Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro give marvelous performances that are difficult to appreciate as anything but performances, because they are so sliced and diced that it's hard to conceive of any of them as living, breathing people. They are tools of Fate, and of course of Inarritu, who arranges them in an order that makes sense only to him. They are fine actors, and they give fine actorly performances, which is the best they can do in the circumstances, but I never once forgot that they were acting, because the film wouldn't let me. I enjoyed the film, but I never connected it on an emotional level: I was left with admiring parts of it, appreciating the skill that went into its construction, and wondering if Inarritu will trust himself with a linear storyline next time around.