Biutiful (Review)

Uxbal’s life isn’t going so hot right now. He’s a single dad caring for two children while his bipolar wife is off sleeping with his brother in between child-beating freakouts. He doesn’t have a great deal of money, and he’s involved with a slowly dying sweatshop and fake souvenir industry or something. His life seems to be collapsing along with the lives of those around him. Also, it turns out he is dying of cancer and he refuses to get treatment, which basically means he urinates a lot of blood. Oh, and he can see and talk to dead people. So that’s something.

In Biutiful, Uxbal is portrayed by Javier Bardem, who is great as usual. The problem is that what happens to his character is so depressing that it becomes unbearable. As a result, we get a whole lot of Javier Bardem pouting. He pouts at home. He pouts as he walks the streets of Barcelona. He pouts in funeral homes, morgues and strip clubs. (He’s on cocaine during the last one, for your information.) Bardem pouts here, there and everywhere he goes. He laughs exactly twice. Seriously, I counted.

Not that you can blame him. The amount of sadness and tragedy hurled at the character of Uxbal would drive just about anyone to a state of perpetual exhaustion. The audience empathizes with him, but that doesn’t make the film any more engaging. It’s one thing to make a film that’s depressing. It’s another to make it almost 150 minutes long. Biutiful moves with the haste of an inebriated tortoise. When it’s over the viewer feels exhausted, and exiting the theater is not a satisfying feeling. Instead, we feel liberated from imprisonment.

Biutiful was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, but this is the first film he has made a film without his ex-writing partner Guillermo Arriaga. In the past they have made Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel, all of which traffic in human misery; often incorporating several intersecting storylines told non-chronologically. In ending his relationship with Arriaga, one might think Iñárritu would feel free to make his films more focused, less scatterbrained and more purposeful. Well, Biutiful is focused in that it only tells one story, and in chronological order. However, the ghost of Arriagan miserabilism still looms over the proceedings.

It must be made clear that Iñárritu is a very good filmmaker. Possibly a great one. Technically, each of his films is very impressive, but the substance never matches the (sometimes painfully obvious) style. A couple sequences in Biutiful are no less than thrilling, particularly a certain mass chase sequence which only serves to complicate things for Uxbal further. However, as in Babel, there is no moment that exists to tell the audience that what they’ve experienced (nay, endured) is worth the trouble. All we know when the film ends is that the film has, in fact, ended. Biutiful comes off like the public beating of an innocent man.

There are a number of people who admire Biutiful, the Academy Awards voters chief among them. Bardem has been nominated for best actor, and the film itself has been nominated for best foreign language film. The former is understandable, as without Bardem Biutiful might have reached walk-out levels of intolerability. With him, however, Iñárritu’s film is able to maintain the façade of intelligent art for a while. In fact, it’s almost because of Bardem’s performance that the rest of the film is uncomfortably depressing. We want things to work out for him, but in the back of our mind we know they won’t, and so the whole ordeal feels ultimately pointless. He’s the lone ray of hope in a sea of depression.

It is notable that Bardem’s performance is the first wholly Spanish performance to be nominated for best actor. The last foreign language performance to be nominated in that category was Roberto Benigni for 1997’s Life is Beautiful. These are two incredibly different films in many respects, and not only because one of them spelled “beautiful” correctly. Benigni’s film is familiar with the concept of happiness.

The thing is, I’d imagine Iñárritu likely achieved the desired effect with Biutiful, if that effect is to convince the viewer that the sun no longer shines in the sky. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. It doesn’t matter how profound a film thinks it is, if the experience feels pointless, the film eventually becomes just that. I continue to have high hopes for Iñárritu, as no one who watches Biutiful can think they’re observing the work of an inept director. My advice to him is the following: before you make another movie, take three deep breaths and an antidepressant.

Rating:  (out of 4)