Biutiful – directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Drama. A dying blackmarketeer must provide for his children. 148 minutes Color 2010.
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To honor his ancestors before he becomes one, is the basis and main inner action of this man’s story. It is framed by a passing on of ancestral respect, and its main central action is the deed of fatherhood. That deed, or deeds, have family and social repercussions, as he tries to do right by those he has adopted. These include the Chinese laborers smuggled into Spain, as he finds work for them, and the wife of a deported co-worker. In many ways he is a middleman in a variety of areas of life, taking care of his drug-trafficker cohorts and their families, as well as his own wife from whom he has left to protect his children. She is a bipolar prostitute, beautifully played by Maricel Álvarez. The entire film is well cast and beautifully acted. And the director has a passport to levels of society and places of Barcelona which make the film ring true at every point. The world the main character, Uxbal, moves through is lively, debauched and horrifyingly poor and perilous, but the director has written a story on the screen that demonstrates a mentoring instrument in Uxbal, and by token, in us all, that transcends and survives the worst that society can impose, the grimmest flatness, the cheapest thrill, the intrusive world of the vile cell-phone. There are some bafflements present. For instance, there might be asked the question: does the director equate homosexuality with the lowest corruption? Does the decay on the ceiling mean heaven is lost to us all? Does the appearance of someone on that ceiling mean something? Does the caretaker of the children abandon them? These things are unclear, but what is clear is the fathering instinct in Javier Barden, who is very beautiful, of course, and beautiful to watch play this saint in the gutter strive to save his two children after he is gone. Visually the story is alert to the camera, and the camera does its narrative job masterfully. All one needs to see to know that the mother of those two children will never be able to take care of them is a single short profile shot of Maricel Álvarex exhaling a cigarette. It is one of the great moments in all film.
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