Biutiful (Wednesday, December 29, 2010) (167)

Biutiful gets its name from a moment in the film where Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is helping his son with his English work. Rather than knowing the exact spelling of the word, the father lets the son get it wrong and moves on to some other catastrophe in his life without correcting it. This is exactly what this film is: a dirty collection of broken stuff, generally taped together, but mostly ugly and aesthetically unpleasant. This is not at all to say that I don't like this film. It is a good movie, but is totally challenging and sometimes repulsive.

The film is about Uxbal, an unusual man with a dark life in Barcelona. He's a black-market hustler, a loving, devoted, if imperfect father and a medium who speaks to the dead. We see him going about his every-day life, struggling to keep it together through mundane things and exotic things. He hatches a get-rich-quick plan with Chinese gangsters and tries to keep his fucked-up family from totally crumbling. He sorta fails at both, but not for trying his hardest.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu constructs a beautiful tale that keeps us always on our toes and on the edge of our seats. His style is always uncomfortable and always beautiful... if beautiful is unsettling and uncomfortable. There are things that don't really work, like the Chinese gangsters...and things that work beautifully, like their guest workers' deaths and them later washing up on-shore. I rally like that he presents Uxbal as a man who straightforwardly talks to the dead, but is not really thrilled with his "gift". (This is treated differently here than in Clint Eastwood's recent Hereafter... a film about talking to the dead. Here, the talking to the dead is just one of many things that Uxbal does.)

Uxbal's relationship with his wife is both very painful and very beautiful. She doesn't know how to deal with normal life with her kids and family, and he doesn't know how to deal with her sensibly, and how to protect their kids from her, but also make sure they have a relationship with her. He doesn't want to cut them off totally from her, but also doesn't want to expose them to her corrupting influence.

He is able to make money in many ways, but still insists on living in poverty and squalor because, like Jesus, a poor life is a comfortable one for him. It is this Jesus life that makes him feel good. This film feels a lot like the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne. Dark, melancholy, stormy.

I like this film, but it doesn't all totally come together for me. Somewhere between the talking to the dead and the sadness it just feels like a bunch of parts that never totally feels complete.

Stars: 3 of 4