Survival of the Weakest: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” (2010)

After the thought-provoking 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006), film aficionados everywhere have come to expect nothing less than brilliant from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Biutiful (2010, Oscar noms for Best Actor and Best Foreign Film) is exactly the socio-political yet (uncomfortably) intimate portrait we waited for.

Not much needs to be said about Javier Bardem’s performance as the anguished father burdened with a manic-depressive, nympho ex-wife, two young children, and a whole slew of other personal demons. Film critics have extensively dealt with it, and besides, when was the last time anyone saw Bardem act below par? Bardem’s character Uxbal is complex, replete with all the human flaws and frailties you can fathom, and as irony would have it, he is also being incapacitated by prostate cancer and is due to expire in months. This leaves him with a dirty conscience which he is desperate to scrub clean before his time comes. He attempts to reconcile with his hopeless ex-wife, to rescue a family of Senegalese refugees from legal hot water, to ease the suffering of the Chinese factory workers he illegally hires out for cheap labour, to ensure his children’s future is secure – all of which backfire at the last minute. Uxbal’s world implodes, and the only source of comfort is the memory of his dead father, which, ironically, is almost non-existent, and the only reason why he is now recalling him is because his body has to be exhumed and cremated for practical reasons. His memory of his father is rooted in two material things: the ring his father left his mother before he departed for Mexico, where he died, and a handful of photos from his youth. Whenever Uxbal looks at these objects, he fears his children will not remember him after his death (just as he does not remember his father).

On a personal level, this is a film about a man who tries to come to terms with mortality and the failures in his life. On a socio-political level, the film functions as a mirror of truth held up to Europe, forcing it to look deep into its heart of darkness. Its 21st-century legacies – illegal immigration, clandestine labour, indigence, cultural alienation – are some of the ills each new batch of democratically elected politicians have vowed to cure but never succeeded.

But the film is no moralistic indictment of European complacency; it gives an atypical “politically incorrect” depiction of immigrants caught in their own struggle for survival. At the end of the day, their survival instinct prevails, and goodness, the quality that is supposed make humans human, is nudged aside and falls flat on its face in Man’s self-generated filth. This makes the film an unforgiving portrait of the dark side of human nature – a qualification that should place it right next to some of Danish enfant terrible Von Trier’s ultra-pessimistic work.

Biutiful is not a flawless piece of art. Some issues introduced in the beginning of the film – Uxbal’s ability to communicate with the dead, and the two Chinese leads’ homosexual affair – are never satisfactorily explored, and at 148 minutes, it does suffer somewhat from plodding sections. These flaws, however, should not undermine the film’s power to move and its harrowing, haunting quality. In this convenience-obsessed era where every Hollywood movie is a remake or a graphic novel franchise installment, Biutiful stands alone at the apex of exquisitely contentious film-making.

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Screenplay: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, and Armando Bo

Cast: Javier Bardem, Maricel Álvarez, Hanaa Bouchaib, Taisheng Chen, and Jin Luo