21 Grams | Chickasaw Gardens — The lawn Cristina comes home to

Paul Rivers drives Cristina home, and home turns out to be a wide lawn under old trees in east Memphis. The neighbourhood is Chickasaw Gardens, and its calm does a great deal of work in the film. This is the life the accident takes apart.

The land was Clarence Saunders' before it was anyone's. Saunders invented the self-service grocery store, made a fortune with Piggly Wiggly, lost it in 1923, and left behind a half-finished pink marble mansion on Central Avenue and a nursery full of ornamental trees. Developers ran curving streets through the nursery in the mid-1920s and kept the planting. That is why the canopy here is older than the houses beneath it, and why the streets bend instead of holding a grid.

At the centre is a small spring-fed lake with a footpath and a low stone edge. The lake belongs to the residents' association, but Chickasaw Gardens is public street, and you can walk all of it.

Park near the lake on a weekday afternoon and go once around. Sprinklers, oaks, almost no traffic. Nothing here looks like a place where a family is destroyed on the way home from a birthday party, and that mismatch is the reason Iñárritu put one here.