Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful is a film that is, in a lot of ways, hard to watch. Not only is the subject matter grim, the setting unattractive, the characters morally compromised; but it’s also just way too long. There are a multitude of plot threads, a bevy of characters, and Iñárritu takes his time exploring all of them. There are a lot of similarities between this and the director’s other films. It is pretty similar in subject matter to Amores Perros, telling multiple stories about a certain class of people in the underbelly of a city. And it shares some similarities with Babel, reaching further than it can manage and becoming a bit of a mess. I liked Amores Perros and I really hated Babel. As I was watching this film I felt a constant push and pull of reactions as I tried to decide what I felt about it. But, even at its worst Biutiful is never boring. It’s a film that leaves you plenty of time to catch your breath, but always confounds you enough to keep you from getting your bearings. During the second half of the film I was very aware of how long I had been sitting there, but it never got to the point where I wished that it would just end. At its best, Biutiful is a film with a few shining moments that work completely and are good enough to make the experience of getting through all of the tough stuff well worth it.
Despite all of the crazy plates that it has spinning in the air at all times, when you cut down to the heart of all the noise this is a film about poverty and the impoverished. The film is set in Barcelona; but not the real Barcelona, only the worst, most poorly kept up parts. We only see where things are crumbling, we only see people who are suffering. Any normal, day-to-day stuff that regular Spaniards are partaking in happens off frame, out of our eyesight. There aren’t any scenes in coffee shops or offices; Biutiful takes place in a very specific world. Part of the story centers around Spain’s immigrants and the work they try to find to keep food in their mouths. We get Senegalese street vendors, and Chinese seamstresses. They cram themselves into too small, falling apart apartments, or sleep hoarded like animals on factory floors. Everything is dirty, broken, used down to its nub. There is constant worry about where the next payday is coming from, the next meal. This is a way of life that is prevalent all over the world, but in the US we are completely deaf, dumb, and blind to it. And it’s that blindness that makes a story told from this point of view feel like a breath of fresh air, even if its despair can be at times oppressive.
The main character is a man named Uxbal played by Javier Bardem. We’re introduced to his character slowly, but thrown into his life suddenly. The first act of the film is a bit of a discombobulating experience. We watch Uxbal live his life without ever having his situation explained. All we get as an establishing scene is an otherworldly dialogue that he shares with a mysterious young man over a dead owl in a snow covered forest (what?). He seems to be sick, he has a sleazy ponytail, he knows how to use a syringe on himself. Is he a drug dealer? Is he a drug addict? The answers aren’t given to us. We have to discover them. We figure out more as we watch him interact with his kids. We continue to learn as we watch him interact with the immigrant workers that he seems to be in charge of. We get confused again as we see him getting paid by relatives of the recently deceased to talk to the spirits of their relatives. We see scenes of him being warm, open, and sincerely caring for those around him. And we see scenes of him being short, irritable, and exploiting the people around him. At first Uxbal seems like a mess of a character, poorly defined, contradictory; but trust in Bardem. Bardem will guide you through the confusion. And the more you learn, the more you realize that Uxbal isn’t poorly conceived, he’s just complex and real; even if he can talk to dead people. He reacts naturally to the situations he is in; you just don’t understand the whole picture at first. But Bardem is good enough to keep you on the hook until you do. This is really his movie, and through sheer force of will he is able to hold all of the disparate elements together and keep the train from going completely off the rails.
Bardem is well supported by the actors around him as well. The two that strongly stood out for me were Guillermo Estrella, who played Uxbal’s young son Mateo, and Maricel Álvarez, who played the erratic mother of his children. Mateo is able to project an amazing vulnerability that really gets you behind his character and makes you feel for the injustices that get thrown his way. He is criticized by his father for every little thing he does. He has a curiosity and thirst for knowledge that is ignored by everyone around him. His mother doesn’t know how to deal with him and often resorts to violence or outright neglect. And the whole way Estrella plays things with an understated sadness, a blank face with just a bit of pain behind puppy dog eyes. There are a lot of other child actors who would have played this role as too precocious and made the character into an annoyance, but in the tiny hands of Estrella, Mateo ended up being one of my favorite aspects of the film. And Álvarez, she plays her character completely different than Estrella. There is nothing subtle or understated about her Marambra, who is pretty much the quintessential psycho ex girlfriend. Marambra is motor mouthed, hyper sensitive, and easily distracted. Her mood swings sweep into a room with a sudden violence and dissipate just as quickly and senselessly. She plays every emotion she feels on her face, which is often puffy and red and snotty. Álvarez completely throws herself into the role and creates a performance so built on emotion that it can’t help but feel completely authentic. What she accomplishes here felt nothing like acting to me, I bought her character as being documentary every second that she was on screen; even when I had yet to understand what she was on about and where she was coming from. There’s a scene where she frantically does dishes to try and distract herself from an emotional meltdown that felt to me like something directly out of real life. I’ve lived this.
The peak of this naturalist approach to acting comes during a dinner scene where Uxbal and Marambra are able for a moment to put their issues aside and lose themselves in time spent with their children. Just when you think that Uxbal is about to snap at Marambra and Mateo for poor manners: he doesn’t. Instead he laughs, and the family goes on to enjoy a fun moment where they banter and tease one another and nobody ends up getting yelled at or hit. It didn’t at all feel like a scene in a movie, it just felt like you were watching a real family enjoy each other’s company. There was clearly real rapport among the adult actors and the children, and I would venture to guess that they all spent a lot of time living together in these apartment sets during the filming. At moments like this, where Biutiful is able to sweep you up and make you forget that you’re watching a movie, it absolutely works. There were a couple other sublime moments for me as well. A shocking turn of events occurs in the factory where Uxbal has Chinese immigrants living and sewing designer knockoffs. The scene hits you like a punch to the gut, as well as it does Uxbal, and Bardem handles the whole sequence with impressive aplomb. Broken, regretful, and full of nothing but pain and bile he seeks out his hard partying brother Tito (Eduard Fernàndez) and ends up spending an uncomfortable night in the company of booze, drugs, and strippers. The juxtaposition of emotions as Bardem sits crumpled in a sea of revelry is handled masterfully. The surrounding chaos only strengthens your bond to his character and amplifies his loneliness.
