Film Review | "Biutiful" (2011)

(originally posted 22 June 2011)

With Biutiful, director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes a steep narrative departure from his previous films; dissimilar to his well-received directorial (and production) efforts in both 21 Grams and Babel, Iñárritu withholds his typically sprawling, occasionally chaotic storytelling structure and focuses his lens solely on Uxbal (a brilliant Javier Bardem): single father to two young children, separated husband to a parentally negligent wife, career criminal, psychic communicator to the afterlife, late-stage cancer patient, and wonderfully-caricatured tragic hero.

In this role, with Iñárritu’s undying focus upon him, and under the weight of a demanding, often agonizing script, Bardem shines, gracing the viewer with a towering achievement of his craft. In navigating his world—a gritty, urban Barcelona—Bardem displays the same thespian chops that were just as evident as in No Country for Old Men (for which he took home a well-earned Oscar; Bardem was also nominated for 2000’s Before Night Falls, as well as this year for Biutiful). Also worth praising is Maricel Álvarez’s convincing portrayal of Marambra, a pitiful parent, likely narcissist, and Uxbal’s separated wife.

Yet while Biutiful succeeds triumphantly with its lead performances, it falls conceptually flat. Splitting writing credits with Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone, Iñárritu has written a tale appropriately rife with terse, occasionally powerful dialogue. The film and its script otherwise suffers the plight of pretension, expressing too heavily on themes of perseverance and the vain morality inherent of being criminal. Where the filmmaker wishes to dynamically convey suffering through what nearly amounts to a contemporary retelling of the narrative of the Book of Job (which has been done quite recently, and acted quite successfully by Michael Stuhlbarg, of HBO renown), Iñárritu's failure is in creating a setting where story can actually happen. Rather, the viewer is offered a Spanish ghetto (one very well-shot with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's gritty, charged lens) with scene upon scene of variously terrible, irksomely contrived fates affecting the protagonist and the rest of the cast.

The film moves quickly, and probably recklessly, from a bleak tale of a father's enduring will to care for his children against his impending early death, a faltering illicit enterprise and the burden of speaking for the dead (apologies to Orson Scott Card), to a movie in which the viewer realizes that not only will nothing good happen, but seemingly nothing good can happen. If anything, one may find the film comically bleak and unyielding; truly every single effort by the altruistic Uxbal to make life better for himself, for his young children, or for the illegal immigrants he is responsible for harboring, is answered, universally, with a consequence even more depressing than the one preceding it.

And the film goes on, and on...and on. At a trying 148 minutes, the present critic found himself checking his watch several times, as much as from a strong desire to more or less end such narrative masochism as from being the consequence of watching a film that wanes considerably in most of its second and third acts.

 Do not, however, mistake the film's shortcomings in mood and plotting for what is an altogether very good artistic effort. Bardem is, as always, to be savored. And while bleak, the setting is absorbing, and for much of the first act, what will eventually become depressingly difficult to stomach is heartrendingly dramatic.