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Kudos to the Academy for recognizing Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful,” which earned Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film (Mexico) and, in a surprise twist, Best Actor for Javier Bardem. This is a difficult picture, even for Iñárritu, who with “Amores Perros,” “21 Grams” and “Babel” has made a career out of chronicling human suffering with broken narratives. “Biutiful” is linear by comparison, but it’s arguably the filmmaker’s bleakest effort yet.
It centers on Uxbal (Bardem), a full-time criminal and part-time medium whose everyday struggles (managing illegal sweatshop workers, dealing with his drug-addicted and bi-polar ex-wife) are compounded by a terminal cancer diagnosis. With only months to live, Uxbal scrambles to ensure his two children will be provided for — a final attempt at long-absent righteousness that’s thematically linked to Uxbal’s spectral encounters with his own father (who died young and whom he never knew). Rather than offering the typical redemptive schmaltz, the director maps a very hard-won road to inner peace, and again depicts a vast and multicultural world around the most personal of sorrows.
Still working with saturated hues and a visceral urban grit, Iñárritu remains, at least aesthetically, the arthouse answer to Tony Scott, and with his gifted eye he captures compelling visuals that support his themes without pretense. His dirty-underbelly vision of Barcelona is the environmental reflection of the many maladies plaguing Uxbal, who, as played by Bardem, is deeply pitiable and hardly registers as a professional felon. He seems merely a repeat victim of circumstance, and Bardem brings a lovely, low-key pain to the role that’s out of step with traditional Oscar fare.
Dedicated to Iñárritu’s father, “Biutiful” is an ode to all that parents leave behind to their children, yet it also is, like the rest of the writer/director’s work, a poetic saga of profound devastation. It’s quite a lot to absorb, at times even too much, but it admirably carries on what Iñárritu’s fans have come to expect from his films: A sad current that pulls you under, but helps you to better appreciate life.
Biutiful
R
Three-and-a-half reels out of four
Opens tomorrow at the Ritz Five
Recommended Rental
For Colored Girls
R
Available Tuesday
Speaking of Oscars, had Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s landmark play been better received, it might have hogged the entire Supporting Actress category.
Featuring powerhouse performances from Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad and Anika Noni Rose (to name only three), “For Colored Girls” is a rare and wonderful feast of fine acting, whose urban clichés and melodramatic excess are all but forgiven in light of the cast’s efforts. SPR
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