Country:
Mexico/Spain
Recognizable Faces:
Javier Bardem
Maricel Alvarez
Directed By:
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Those of you who have seen 21 Grams and Babel will understand why I like referring to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu as "Captain Miserable". The man directs the saddest, most tormented films and yet he finds ways to reach out to the greater audiences. I liked his last two films, despite their emotionally grueling nature. When Josie and me left the theater after Babel, we went on a month long movie hiatus. Gonzalez Inarritu makes that kind of movies. Long, slow and difficult to process. Yet he makes them attractive enough, so that we come back for more. I walked into Biutiful with the resigned confidence of a man who already accepted he was about to get owned. The combination of Javier Bardem, one of my favorite actors and Gonzalez Inarritu made it inevitable. Biutiful would be a punishing, yet enlightening experience. So I thought.
We follow the story of Uxbal (Bardem) who's a low life thug, trying to raise two kids in Barcelona, with a wife that seem to be bipolar. Professionally speaking, the man's a complete scumbag. He sets up black market activities for illegal immigrants such as street sales and (believe it or not) a fucking sweatshop. Right off the bat, it's hard to feel any sympathy for him. But Uxbal is dying of prostate cancer. The metastasis has spread to his bones and he has only a few months to live. He possesses some kind of unexplained gift to help the recently departed go to the other side in peace, which should make him accept his fate, but he doesn't. Biutiful is the story of his attempt to make good with the life he lived and the people he hurt. I'll be blunt here, I have seen better stories about the subject. This is a movie written and directed by a man who believe his own hype. Flavor Flav once taught America that it's never good when someone does.
What made Babel so great was that it didn't try to be sad. The point was to attempt to capture the complexity of contemporary life. Gonzalez Inarritu make you care about the Afghani, the Japanese, the Americans, the Mexicans. Everybody was a part of the ongoing drama. Babel was a clever movie. Unfortunately, the main problem of Biutiful is that its director found the story very sad from the start. When I say that, I mean before the script was even written. The writing is never poor and it drags the rest of the movie down for a spectacular two and a half hours fall. The main problem is that it's relying so much on Uxbal, his problems and his ways of finding redemption that the touching scenes are few and far between. Javier Bardem does a TRE-MEN-DOUS job at trying to make him charming, but the portrait is still shaky. More often than not, there are long scenes that are not especially stunning, where Uxbal is trying to drown in woes in various ways: work, loves, family and a really laughable scene where he snorts coke in a titty bar where girls where a titty on their head and nipples on their butt cheeks. I know a certain director who never set foot in one of those.
There is no insightful portrait of Barcelona. You cannot feel the pulse of the city through a wide array of supporting characters. Javier Bardem is often left to himself to display the inner-self of a dying man (except for maybe one scene). There are very few gripping family scenes, but there are often long meal scenes where nothing out of the ordinary happens. The scenario is badly written and it shows. Biutiful suffers from a very bad pacing. There are very good scenes, but maybe what? Five, six of those? The beginning/ending scene (which is SOMEWHAT the same, not completely) will lead you to believe it's going to be something special, but they just a nice wrapping around a rather empty movie. I had great sympathy for Uxbal's friend Ekweme (Cheikh Ndiaye) and his wife, but they are virtually absent from the movie. Even when they are on screen, they barely have any lines. It's all about a guy who doesn't have much to say. Very disappointing, pretentious and weak offering from a talented director. There are glimpses of his own self, but Biutiful has poor structure and poor understanding of what it's trying to say.
SCORE: 55%