Watts: '21 Grams' Challenging

Actress Naomi Watts is no stranger to critical acclaim, though she may be getting the strongest praise of her career for the new film "21 Grams."

In it, she plays a woman coming to terms with a tragic past and trying to deal with her present and perhaps plan a future with a college professor played by Sean Penn. She is hoping to become pregnant with his child through artificial insemination.

Watts tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, "Without giving too much away, it's, to me, about love, hope, redemption, guilt, grief. It covers a lot of things and it addresses the bigger questions in life."

Shot in winter mostly in Memphis, Tenn., the film has a dark, grainy feel to it. Asked what it was like to work in a film where the subject matter is so weighty, Watts says it is challenging yet liberating.

"That is why I do what I do and I search for roles like that," she says. "People may say it's a difficult film, but, to me, a difficult film is a bad film. This is the type of film that, although it addresses some confronting subjects, it's effective and I'm very proud of it."

Also proud of her work are also her co-stars Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Penn has been quoted as saying that working with Watts made him raise his game.

It was not always that way for Watts. When she started out, she says, she faced a lot of rejection and even thought of giving acting up.

"After a million different pieces of rejection, you start to let it become the truth. Which is awful. And quite demeaning," she says, "I had packed my bags metaphorically and physically many times. But in the nick of time, I would find a job and it would have a lot of promise and, maybe it didn't turn out the way it was supposed to, but there would be a hook that would always just grab me just as I was about to walk away, But I really didn't have a plan B. I didn't know what else I would be good at or enjoy."

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