After 21 Grams and Babel, there was no way that I was going to see another film by Alejandro González Iñárritu, but Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) made me loosen my hatred of Iñárritu’s overwrought style and convinced me to give him another chance. Biutiful, which was released before Birdman, is still plagued by the predictable overwrought personal apocalyptic style of 21 Grams and offensive faux international sensibility of Babel, but is more appealing and successful because Biutiful is intensely personal and intimate in its mapping of tragic ambitions instead of an ugly series of stereotypes strung loosely together. It does not hurt that Biutiful stars Javier Bardem, one of the best actors of our time who is able to convey a complex array of emotions by simply being.
Biutiful is essentially about criminals, exploiters and those who occupy the edges of society and how they fall off that edge and regularly descend into death, chaos and oblivion, but they are more defined by their good intentions than their awful results. Iñárritu really shows his characters’ humanity. If I can’t simply dismiss a character as a human trafficker not deserving of a viewer’s sympathy, Iñárritu has done something right in Biutiful. There is an implicit condemnation of exploitive larger societal forces at work who happily let people destroy themselves as long as it does not disturb their sensibilities or can’t be ignored.
Biutiful also employs a judicious amount of magical realism and symbolism that I didn’t completely understand or get until I was way into the middle of the movie. I would advise viewers to really pay attention to the opening scenes and anytime Bardem’s character enters a space where there is mourning. Biutiful is one of the rare times that I approve of the narrative framing device, “how we got here” to open the film.
I would recommend Biutiful with a trigger warning because a lot of awful and sad things happen though it isn’t explicit or gratuitous. There are a couple of scenes with female nudity, including one strip club scene.