Review: BIUTIFUL - Bardem's Towering Performance Makes The Slog Worth It

rating: 3.5

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful is very much the kind of unrestrained, thematically ambitious film made only after a filmmaker has proven themselves on terra firma following a run of work that has hit both critically and commercially. While his musings on humanity are as bleak as ever, and the film is unmistakably his most relentlessly gloomy, Biutiful is a confronting, powerful film that finds Iñárritu comfortably at his most audacious, topped by a mesmerising, Oscar-nominated performance from the ever-reliable Javier Bardem. Uxbal (Bardem) is a drifter, weaving through Barcelona's grimy underworld like a phantom, acting as a negotiator between the gossamer-thin illusions of authority - corrupt cops and snide factory owners - and those who rail against them - drug dealers and immigrant workers - while also having the ability to speak to the dead briefly before they pass to the other side, exploiting his ability and grief-stricken loved ones for cash. After a surprise cancer diagnosis numbers his days considerably, Uxbal comes to consider what his life - up to this point amounting to little more than bottom-feeding and crass manipulation - will mean for the legacy he leaves his children, and briskly goes about trying to make a better life for them before he departs. While Biutiful is far from Iñárritu's best work - though that isn't a particularly weighty criticism given the quality of his output - it leaves the impression of being truest to his vision, unfettered by the need to engage in strictly plausible physical scenarios for the sake of the "real drama" that typically gets Academy recognition. Instead, Iñárritu discovers grand emotional truths amid his peculiar brand of magical realism, and though the supernatural elements are smartly downplayed and massaged disarmingly into the gritty travelogue of Barcelona's putrid gutters, it is liable to be Biutiful's most divisive element. Though the film would play just as well without the incongruent otherworldly scenes, it is not these on which the film's success rests; that is Javier Bardem, who not only runs with the ball, but jettisons it off to another dimension entirely. Bardem is astonishingly good in a subdued, smouldering performance, which bests the sort of calculated contemplation that George Clooney attempted with mixed results in last year's The American. How Bardem succeeds where Clooney did not is in populating his anguished glances with a heart and a soul, abetted unquestionably by the film's soulful and emotionally authentic, if deeply unpleasant, series of events. As a work much like Clooney's in which dialogue is light and faces tell the tale, Bitufiul's meditative elements could so easily have devolved into a self-consciously moody mug-fest, yet there is plenty of humanity, and plenty for Uxbal to talk - and occasionally shout - about, allowing Bardem to essentially have his cake and eat it; he works the scrunched face and tortured eyes better than anyone, while also emoting in more surface-level ways, doing both wonderfully. The success of the film lives and dies with Bardem, for while it is moving and dramatically potent, the grim reality of Iñárritu's well-thumbed worldview may have proven too unwieldy in the hands of a lesser actor. In a film which is essentially a series of increasingly devastating scenes of abuse, exploitation, illness, regret, sadness and longing, Bardem surrenders the humanity of his deeply flawed character with heartbreaking precision. That he is able to make of Uxbal an even slightly sympathetic figure is his real triumph, and it anchors the perceived difficulty of the material. While certainly padded and ponderous at 147 minutes, Biutiful is brave, unabashedly heart-rending filmmaking, topped by Javier Bardem's strongest, most nuanced performance to date, and he is unequivocally the reason that you should see it. Biutiful is released in the U.K. from today.