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Biutiful
| Released |
28 January 2011 |
| Director |
Alejandro González Iñárritu |
Starring
|
Javier Bardem, Maricel Alvarez, Hanaa Bouchaib, Guillermo Estrella |
Writer(s)
|
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bo, Nicolás Giacobone |
Producer(s)
|
Fernando Bovaira, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jon Kilik |
| Origin |
Spain, Mexico |
| Running Time |
147 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama |
| Rating |
15A |
|
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Grim and even grimmer!
Two giants of Latin cinema have come together for this film. Javier Bardem, who gained international renown for his Oscar-winning turn in No Country For Old Men, is perhaps the finest actor working in Spanish cinema. Alejandro González Iñárritu is one of Mexico’s finest directors who made a stunning debut with the excellent Amores perros. He followed this with two English language films, the excellent but hard going 21 Grams and then the overreaching Babel, which was just hard going.
Biutiful is the first feature in a $100 million five-picture deal between González Iñárritu and other well-known Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro with Universal Pictures and Focus Features. Cuarón and del Toro are credited as producers and it is likely that Iñárritu will reciprocate as a producer on future projects. Though it is Mexico’s nomination for Best Foreign Language Picture at the Oscars this year, the film is actually set in Barcelona.
Bardem plays Uxbal, an underground fixer who ekes out a living as a middleman between Chinese counterfeiters, African street hawkers and corrupt local police and businessmen. Uxbal has his troubles though; he’s separated from his alcoholic, manic-depressive wife (Maricel Álvarez) and has to raise his two children on his own. Then he finds out that he’s dying from cancer and only has months to live. In addition to all this he’s burdened by the fact that he has a sideline going to funerals and helping the souls of the recently departed pass over to the other side.
Yes, that’s right, amongst everything else that’s going on, he’s also some sort of spirit guide!
Setting the action among the often ignored and exploited poverty-stricken immigrant communities of Barcelona is noble but this is relentlessly grim stuff. At nearly two and a half hours long, it’s actually something of an ordeal as things get worse and worse for Uxbal and the various immigrants he deals with. The supernatural aspect of the plot is never fully explored though. After introducing it at the start, Iñárritu seems to instantly lose interest in it and it’s really quite inconsequential to the whole story.
Were it not for the brilliant central performance of Bardem, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes, the film would almost be unbearably bleak. Bardem’s tour de force makes it worthwhile as he brings great humanity and pathos to a character that’s basically decent but who works in a lousy business. His interaction with his children (Hanaa Bouchaib and Guillermo Estrella) is beautifully played, as are the confrontations with his tragically fragile wife.
It is definitely Bardem’s film as he’s onscreen for nearly all of it but he always manages to hold our attention. It confirms Bardem as one of the finest actors of his generation, up there with Daniel Day Lewis and Sean Penn. Bardem was nominated for an Oscar this week, but winning will be tough as getting academy voters to actually watch this particularly dark film might be a difficult task.
To sum up, it’s worth seeing for a great turn by a top actor, but it’s also a flawed and depressing film.
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Jim O’Connor |
