Beautiful Babble
Biutiful
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Runtime: 148 min.
A friend misread the ad for Biutiful as Pitiful. He wasnt 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 Bardems suffering everyman trying to hold together numerous catastrophic lives, including his soon-to-be-orphaned children, his drug-addicted ex-wife, his cuckolding brotherall while pissing blood and facing his own death. Bardems leonine profile doesnt make him heroic, Uxbals 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 childrens scrawl (as mawkish nod to The Pursuit of Happyness).
Theres 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 Aronofskys Black Swan. Then there are scenes where the bodies of sweatshop victims float on the ceiling. Its symbolic of either mankinds sorrowful, inescapable non-transcended lives, or the low ceiling of Iñárritus imagination.