Biutiful

A review by Christina Phelps


I went to see Alejandro González Iñárritu's lastest, Biutiful, last night at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema on Houston, not sure what to expect really (I don't even think I had seen a trailer), but in hindsight, I should have known what to expect.  I've seen 21 Grams and Babel (Amores Perros is on the list, I promise) - bleakness and narrative complexity were sure to be forthcoming.


That being said, there was no way to be prepared for the bleakness and narrative complexity of Biutiful.  There is very little respite.  There is very little levity.  There is some, in the small quiet moments, a look between the characters, in the eyes of the children, in beautiful shots of the sea or the city, but tragedy doesn't so much lurk as permeate.  It inflates the characters lungs. 


21 Grams was bleaker than Babel, it was also less complicated because there were really only the three main characters and the story revolved around them in a very close-fitting way.  It was a braid.  (However chopped up temporally.)  Babel, on the other hand, had essentially four different storylines that only slightly overlapped one another (if in complicated ways that were more evident to the audience than the characters themselves).  


Biutiful was bleaker than 21 Grams (seems impossible, I know) and far more complicated than Babel.  The storylines are stacked on top of one another.  The story revolves entirely around this one man, but there are so many storylines that it's as if he is a maypole.  


Javier Bardem was absolutely amazing as Uxbal.  When I saw The Fighter last week, one of the things we (and everyone else) talked about were the performances, which are amazing, but they are only so amazing that they draw attention to themselves as performances.  As Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker, "So much acting." You don't get that here.  What you get here are the characters, which is the point, right?


I would love to write more about the character of Uxbal.  He's interesting because he's the central character of course, but what struck me most about him was his role as a father in the literal sense (to his children) and his role as a sort of father-figure to the various groups of people in his life (his ex-wife, the immigrants, the parents of the dead child).  Even when he's paying off the cop, the cop keeps saying how he has to put food on the table for his kids, so it becomes this thing where the cop's kids are unwittingly dependent on Uxbal and even though he seems to think he shouldn't keep giving the cop money he does because he can't let his kids starve, or he knows the cop will just get money a different (potentially more dangerous) way, and Uxbal is constantly caught between being the exploiter and the protector, between getting his cut and being benevolent.  And all this when he didn't have a father.  Or, he did, but he never knew him, could never know him.  He just knew him as an escapee, as heroic in some way.  All these things about death and remembrance.     


I have to say though, I was glad when it became clear that most of the film was in chronological order.  A few minutes in, I was already anticipating exhaustion.  


And it was exhausting, but in a really satisfying way.  It was a beautiful film, a relevant story, a very human and compassionate piece, despite the bleakness, despite the tragedy.  But really because of it.