Ryan McNeil
This world seems to be filled with equal parts beauty and tragedy. It’s easy to get so caught up in one, and forget about the other…thus what often happens is fate shoves something at us to balance the scales back out. The trick is to take it all, and be able to make enough sense of it.
But there’s the rub, sometimes we can’t make sense of it…not even in the movies.
BIUTIFUL is the story of Uxbal (Javier Bardem). There are three truths about this man that will be the thrust of the film…
Uxbal can commune with the recently dead. He is able to give surviving family members a sense of peace. Prayers are conveyed, secrets are unlocked, everybody goes home happy. Oh, and Uxbal gets paid.
Uxbal is facilitating black market entrepreneurs in Barcelona. He is working with a pair of exploitive Chinese men who have a dungeon of mistreated workers cranking out pirated goods. Uxbal then hands them over to street merchants who sell them to tourists. Uxbal wants to be cautious about this venture so as to keep things running. Unfortunately, dealers selling where they aren’t supposed to, a basement full of immigrants in shoddy conditions, and local cops less willing to turn a blind eye are aligning against his hard work.
Finally, Uxbal is suffering from an aggressive type of cancer. It has made things complicated with his ex-wife (which of course were plenty complicated already), and forced him to cherish what time he still has with his two young children.
BIUTIFUL is a cinematic paradox. It is a sprawling film in every way possible. Its pace, its visuals, its structure, its score…even its runtime. That’s not to say that sprawl is a bad thing to aim for: some of the best films are stories that sprawl and unfurl with much detail to be pondered through repeat viewings. The paradox is the fact that all of this sprawl is dedicated to one rather ordinary man.
The ballad of Uxbal should be just that – a ballad. It should be a character piece about a man trying to deal with his mortality, and what it will mean to those he loves. It works best when it’s intricate and subtle. It should leave us wanting to spend more time with this man to understand him better, and wanting to watch a scene again to pick up on his every facial tick. It should not go and go and go until I feel like I could give you a complete profile on the man right down to his shoe size and social security number.
Instead of a ballad, BIUTIFUL seems like a tome – one that isn’t out to tell you a story so much as it is prepared that you will eventually just give up and stop listening. At the core of BIUTIFUL are three disjointed narrative threads – Uxbal’s health, his relation to the exploited workers, and his ability to commune with the recently deceased. Beyond the fact that this seemingly adds up to one thread too many, they play at a complete disconnect.
I can’t say I blame Iñárritu for trying: if anything he tried too hard. He has dotted this film with more throwaway elements of elegance than most movies manage at full-throttle. The problem is, that he’s never able to bring them back to what’s happening in the story. They become disruptions more than accents. What’s worse, they take what could be an achingly beautiful tale and make it feel painfully long.
It pains me to say that, because in doses there are a lot of things to like about this movie. Javier Bardem plays tortured so very well, and carries himself in a manner that offsets his sorrow and pain with a healthy dose of determination. He plays Uxbal as a man who looks like he could start weeping at any moment, but is far too proud to let anybody see him in such a state.
Likewise, the story does have moments of true heartbreak and genuine shock. There is true tragedy afoot within BIUTIFUL, with scenarios as upsetting as anything I’ve seen this year – and I’ve seen some upsetting shit this year! Then it’s all framed so artistically. I desperately wanted to hail avant garde images of birds flocking, but there’s only so much avant garde I can handle.
Eventually you have to stop teasing me with avant garde, and finally just get to the “garde”.
You know how sometimes you’ll get different types of friends together and they don’t really mesh? The work friends are on one end of the table, the family friends at the other end, and the neighbourhood friends at a whole other table…and none of ’em are intermingling? That’s BIUTIFUL.