Watts and Penn at the Venice Film Festival to present 21 Grams. (Reuters)

New York, Jan. 12 (Reuters): Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts make three the magic number once again for Mexican film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in the triangular suspense film 21 Grams.

Inarritu won an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film with his first feature Amores Perros in 2000, titled Life’s a Bitch in English, a gritty glimpse at Mexico City life in three separate segments, all spun off the same traffic accident.

The charismatic director teamed up with the same screenwriter, compatriot Guillermo Arriaga, and carried over some of the same formula for 21 Grams, a study of death, life and hope in his first English-language feature.

In the movie, a freak accident causes the lives of a critically ill mathematician (Penn), a grieving mother (Watts) and an ex-convict (Del Toro) to intersect. The title refers to the weight the body is said to lose at the moment of death, which some say is the weight of the soul.

“The only way I can try to tell a story is with the way that I feel,” Inarritu said in an interview when asked about the structural similarities between the movie and his previous film. “Every tree projects a shadow and I have my shadow line. That is my voice.” The voice of this film echoes with flashbacks and flash-forwards between the characters that keep the audience on edge about the unfolding puzzle.

“We are connecting all the time. I think people want to feel first rather than understand things,” he said about taking a nonlinear approach. “I wanted to get the people to be part of the experience of the story, not just to eat popcorn.”

Inarritu initially sought out Arriaga because he was a fan of Arriaga’s novels and short stories. And helping to turn Arriaga’s Spanish script into an English one set in Memphis is enabling Inarritu to extend his “voice” to a potentially huge audience.

The film, released late last year, was called “tough, smart, relentless, provocative” by the Washington Post, and “an extraordinarily satisfying vision” by The New York Times.

Inarritu, 40, said his cast gave him “the best ingredients” to prepare the complex puzzle, and Penn, del Toro and Watts form a towering triangle.

Penn plays a college professor in need of a heart transplant and gives an understated performance that was noted along with his acclaimed role in Mystic River when he was named best actor of the year by the National Board of Review. Watts plumbs new emotional depths in her role as a former party girl coming to grips with the sudden loss of her model husband and young children. Del Toro, who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor in Traffic (2000), smoulders on screen in the role of an ex-convict who has embraced religion and is forced to confront his faith.

Arriaga said the characters think they’ve overcome very deep, personal hells only to find something pulls them back from the abyss. “Yet, from this very deep abyss they can recover hope. They never lose the sense of hope,” he said.