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Benicio Del Toro
'21 Grams'Benicio Del Toro is a big man, a man who can accurately be said to loom, both physically and metaphysically. That he plays what society might consider a small man in Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's brutal melodrama ''21 Grams'' -- haplessly ''saved'' ex-con Jack Jordan, imploding with self-indulgent guilt and dying to annihilate himself on God's altar -- only lengthens the long shadow Del Toro casts as an actor.
''Yes, he is a very intimidating man, though I don't think he means to be,'' muses costar Melissa Leo, who plays Jordan's plucky, practical wife, Marianne, in the film, the first English-language production from the acclaimed Mexican director of 2000's ''Amores Perros.'' ''The massiveness...massive outside and inside. For me, as an actress, all of that becomes just delicious and wonderful. It's that much more to work with. [I thought:] 'I'd better rise to that. I better be the woman who could marry that man.'''
In the hands of anyone other than the capable 36-year-old thesp (who already sports a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the deeply conflicted Mexican cop in 2000's ''Traffic''), Jordan's character arc, with its Raskolnikovian crises and operatic invocations of heaven, might have sagged in the middle. But Del Toro makes Jordan's battered humanity so natural, so lived-in, that the part just becomes more fascinating, especially in the film's domestic moments. ''It's scary. It's dangerous to watch,'' says Leo of a dinner scene in ''21 Grams'' in which Jordan forces his daughter to ''turn the other cheek'' after her brother swats her.
There can be no question of the love this man has for his family -- or of his dogmatic perversion of that love. Containing both extremes requires a sturdy vessel. ''Here, there was no work,'' Leo enthuses of Del Toro's performance. ''It was like falling off a log. A great big, massive log.'' Perhaps the Academy will find it just as easy to award him the Oscar again.
