A surface tension of liquid misery is stretched over this movie, like unshed tears on a brimming eyeball. Everyone and everything in it seems suspended in a warm ocean of unhappiness.
Biutiful is sometimes beautiful — and sometimes exasperating, questionable and absurd. Its attempt at a globalist, humanist aesthetic of compassion looks from certain angles thrillingly ambitious — and from others dreamy and self-congratulatory, like a Benetton ad from the 1990s, and verging on misery porn-chic.
But there is no doubt about it: Biutiful is impressive filmmaking. Whether we want to receive it, the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu offers his audience an entire created world, personal and distinctive — and Biutiful is his most accomplished picture so far.
Javier Bardem gives an overpowering (and Oscar-nominated, earlier this year) performance as the anguished street hustler Uxbal, who finds himself bowed down by troubles. It is his presence, and that great face of his, looming hugely and handsomely into the camera, that carries the movie — that, and some inspired flashes of visual poetry, chiefly a brilliantly conceived meeting between Uxbal and his late father.
Notes of evasion and self-pity
Uxbal is a nasty piece of work by any yardstick, surely, a guy who makes his money exploiting poor people, and yet repeatedly we are invited to sympathise with him. The conclusion also sounds notes of evasion and self-pity, and in a movie of less self-confidence, less rhapsodic euphoria, they would be unbearable — they come close to being unbearable as it is. But the sheer tidal force of the film sweeps it along and it is speckled with moments of poetry and unarguable brilliance.
Iñárritu also does impressive work conveying the densely populated loneliness of the city: Barcelona is here very far from the picture-perfect tourist destination. This is a director who has, in recent years, verged on self-parody with his glib internationalism and his repeated device of hooking disparate lives together with a random event. Biutiful is an advance on this and the fluency and confidence of Iñárritu’s cinematic language are really spectacular. It may not convert or convince, but it is certainly arresting: not magic realism exactly, but rather the director’s own brand of magic naturalism. —