What do we do when we’ve been given a few months to live? So often we take our time here for granted, but what if we were faced with imminent death? Unlike most films that focus on bucket lists or grand gestures and the romanticism of someone’s last days, Biutiful takes a hard and sometimes ugly look at death, the complexity of our humanity and what we do to survive.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film follows Uxbal (Javier Bardem), an earnest man who makes his living as a go-between for two Chinese men who run a factory making knock-off designer purses and the African men who sell their wares on the street. It’s not the most honorable job, but he does it as respectably as he can, negotiating wages for the Chinese workers and developing a bond with Ekweme, a Senagalese man with a wife and newborn son. It’s his relationship with Ekweme and with Lilli, a Chinese factory worker who babysits his daughter, that keep him invested in the moral integrity of what he does for a living.
Uxbal’s life is far from simple: given sole custody of his two children in the divorce from his bi-polar and often manic wife Marambra (Maricel Álvarez), Uxbal has also just been diagnosed with fatal prostate cancer. Given a few months to live, Uxbal must get his affairs in order quickly to ensure his family is cared for.
Iñárritu is known for his gritty dramas about the human condition (21 Grams, Babel); Biutiful is similar in theme, but different in execution. Departing from writer Guillermo Arriaga, Iñárritu is able to abandon his typical structure of interweaving stories and the non-linear format and really narrow his focus. You can still see how Iñárritu places importance on every character’s life, but he spends less time doing so. There’s an evident impulse there to expand on Ekweme’s story or the story of Marambra and her affair with Uxbal’s brother Tito, but Iñárritu shows great skill and restraint in only revealing as much as his audience needs to see and utilizing the art of implication.
Biutiful quietly pulls you in and steadily tightens its grip, almost choking you by the end of the third act. When Uxbal relents out of desperation for normalcy and the understandable desire for familiar stability for his children by moving back in with his wife, we sense impending doom. For as somber and sobering as Bardem is, Álvarez’s portrayal of Marambra is gracefully chaotic, delicate and messy. In her happiest moments, we wait for her to falter and break; we sense the dark impulses boiling under the surface. Marambra is so genuine in her desire to be a good wife and mother, and like Uxbal, we want to believe she can be better. At one point, while explaining why she attacked their son, Marambra tells Uxbal she’s just trying to survive. For someone so mentally afflicted, these irrational behaviors are so logical in their mind, and that’s where Iñárritu and Álvarez nail the role of Marambra so perfectly. Her destructive impulses appear to her as avenues of relief and her moral compass does not appear to exist until later, after the damage has been done and she feels remorse for her actions. But it was the only way she knew how to feel better; to ignore these impulses would mean certain death.
Marambra’s disorder is so affecting that no one, most certainly not herself, sees that Uxbal is dying.
Complicating things further is Uxbal’s ability to communicate with the recently deceased. This element adds something more meaningful to the proceedings and elevates the film to a surreal place. Iñárritu smartly avoids making this component the focal point of the film, instead using it to illustrate Uxbal’s compassion and sensitivity, and his relationship with death. Uxbal sometimes takes money from families to speak to their beloved dead, but this proves to be too much for a man so heavily burdened.
Iñárritu doesn’t play dress-up with his film, hiding the less than savory parts of life just because someone is dying. Too often directors choose to play their ill protagonists as innocents and martyrs, having their audience question how such a horrible thing could be happening to such a good, undeserving person. Uxbal is far from perfect, and to further punctuate the realism of the film, Iñárritu perfectly constructs a beautifully dingy world, capturing every crack in the ceiling and water stain on the wall with detail. There is no pretense here – just life, as it is, dirty and messy and sad. Uxbal struggles to save money for his children by skimming from his employers at every given opportunity. There is something nobler about this than a dying father in any other generic film, leaving his children some convenient life insurance with a touching letter to be read after he’s gone.
Biutiful suggests something more hopeful with its fantastically eerie images of people pressed against ceilings as they leave their earthly bodies behind. It’s devastatingly grim and sobering, but on the edges there exists light and the truth we must all inevitably accept. All of the elements in Biutiful conspire to create an elegantly gripping and heartbreaking film about the burdens of life and death, and how good intentions can still yield meaningful results in the darkest places.
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Notable Cast: Javier Bardem, Maricel Álvarez, Eduard Fernández
Writer(s): Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bo, Nicolás Giacobone
