Beautiful Babble

Biutiful

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Runtime: 148 min.

A friend misread the ad for Biutiful as “Pitiful.“ He wasn’t wrong. This latest overlong mash-up by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu continues down the same meretricious path as his overlong movies. This time Iñárritu triangulates the story of a hustling Spaniard, Uxbal (Javier Bardem); Asian sweatshop workers and the closeted gay Asian who exploits them; plus African illegal immigrant street vendors. It's Babel all over again with the multilingual storylines speaking the same global maudlinity.

Iñárritu knows nothing genuine or credible about the human condition; he specializes in button-pushing, saccharine clichés. One of the worst is Bardem’s suffering everyman trying to hold together numerous catastrophic lives, including his soon-to-be-orphaned children, his drug-addicted ex-wife, his cuckolding brother—all while pissing blood and facing his own death. Bardem’s leonine profile doesn’t make him heroic, Uxbal’s simply the most sad-sack protagonist since that Harlem Little Nell, Precious. Not to be left out of bleeding bladder Liberalism, Iñárritu throws in a breast-feeding black earth mother who can look after his children. Bad ideas make Iñárritu seem original, like the misspelled title taken from his children’s scrawl (as mawkish nod to The Pursuit of Happyness).

There’s blatant hand-held camerawork that focuses on obvious, redundant details of what we already see, then splashes of surreal bad-taste, like a disco where a go-go girls’ heads and buttocks are tits, which look like outtakes from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Then there are scenes where the bodies of sweatshop victims float on the ceiling. It’s symbolic of either mankind’s sorrowful, inescapable non-transcended lives, or the low ceiling of Iñárritu’s imagination.