Biutiful Movie Review

Seeing the movie was a long time coming. The Mexican New Wave was the most influential group of movies to me, my favorites including Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men, Pan’s Labrynth, Babel, and Amorres Perros. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is the least famous of the directing trio (him, Del Toro, and Cuaron), making films almost exclusively in non-English (excluding 21 Grams) which contain such powerful human suffering that many people are turned off by them.

Biutiful is no exception. It is one of the bleakest, most atmospherically tragic movies in recent memory. It makes other movies exploring such material seem upbeat. Javier Bardem is the leading character, Uxbal, and his performance is as emotionally devastating and raw as Brando in Last Tango In Paris.

The depths of of Uxbal’s pain and humanism cannot be overstated. So many actors and actresses gain recognition through transformation and rage-filled mania, such as Colin Firth’s transformation which won him an Oscar. Rarely are performances as affecting as Bardem’s, seeming to reach through the medium and remind us of ourselves and others we care about.

The movies plot is simple: Uxbal is a criminal who smuggles illegal aliens and finds them working at companies as dirt cheap labor (slaves for the most part). He is diagnosed with cancer and Ikiru-style tries to do a few good things before he passes. It isn’t redemption, he doesn’t have time to care, it is about making sure his loved ones are safe. He is poor (relatively) and his children have no one but him and a mother who is deeply troubled.

Unlike Ikiru, which sees the world through a lens of good against evil, Biutiful sees life in a much more murky, less black and white, way. Uxbal is essentially a good man despite what he does for a living — he claims that he’s only trying to “find the people work” and I think he really is trying to do what he thinks is right.

There are surreal moments where Uxbal feigns, or maybe not, that he can speak to the dead in their passing (not to mention getting a few dollars from their loved ones while at it). I must comment that death has never “looked” so real in a movie since White Ribbon. One scene where Uxbal sits with a few dead children lying in their coffins is disturbing in a way that is hard to describe.

Inarritu’s camera is loosely Bergmanesque, providing the viewer with a visual poetry of images, but in a casual way as if documenting things that are happening organically, which are certainly not.

One such image is when Uxbal is talking on the phone during sunset and a group of birds fly across the background — the camera slowly swings up to show them, while Uxbal briefly takes in the bittersweet moment.

Another is the motif of a water damaged ceiling. Seen causally at a glance, without creeping zooms or extreme close ups, its stark symbolism might be a bit too “obvious” for some people, but I always say that you can never be too obvious when it comes to metaphor and symbolism in movies.

To me this was one of the best movies of last year. Only beaten out by The Social Network and a few others.

I’m guessing there will be a time when people look back on Biutiful and declare it the understated masterpiece that it really is. The people who are claiming that it is a “feel-bad” movie, a term I would piss on if it could manifest itself in real life, or too overtly bleak annoy me to a point of rage. Why so objectionable to a movie that tries to show life as the painful existence that some many in the world, privileged or not, must endure?

There is a moment in the movie where Bardem’s character is faced with the unspeakable task of telling his daughter he’s going to die. He looks at her with such longing and pain, begging her to remember him. It is one of the more quiet, moving scenes you’re likely ever to see.

My favorite artists, in any medium, accept the pain, tragedy, and pointlessness of life, but then show why we live it and what makes human beings so special. For some reason this movie kind of highlighted that idea for me.

-Collin