Do the right thing

With Biutiful, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the first time in the ten years he’s been making features works with out his usual scriptwriter, presumably from force of circumstances. But the rest of the back room team of editor, cinematographer, composer and production designer all remain the same from Iñárritu’s previous three features back to Amores Perros, the film that first brought him to international attention. And almost completely the temporal complexities of Guillerma Arriaga structuring have been discarded for a simpler linier narrative.

It could be argued, with Amores Perros these structural complexities paid off but the subsequent 21 Grams and Babel were impeded. The story development and lightness that Inarritu’s storytelling deserves, considering the ambitious Atlas like undertakings, mindboggling interconnectedness and hysterical realist interrogations require a character or something manifest to ground and channel the global concerns Inarritu precipitates

So a tabula rasa of sorts then for Inarritu. Set in Barcelona amongst the crowded, narrow and littered streets of the immigrant working class and poor Biutiful uses the story of the last few months of Uxbal’s life, who’s just been diagnoses with a malignant and terminal cancer. As it happened Uxbal ignored the initial symptoms and when asked by the doctor why he didn’t do something about it straight away he replies that it never hurt as much as it does now. But now, as it turns out, is too late, Uxbal is in deaths waiting room waiting to be taken over with a few months of ‘quality of life’ left.

For Uxbal’s this is a ‘few months’ to sort out the almighty mess that this untimely development creates. Uxbal’s a man walking in the valley of life and death and his life is tangled up in the lives of others, in other words he can’t just walk off and let the curtain drop. Uxbal has two young children, an estranged wife who’s a prostitute and bipolar and is unfit to care for their children add to this his dealings with corrupt police, illegal immigrant hawkers and sweatshops that become death traps. Oh and Uxbal has the gift of being able to talk to the recently deceased and make a little side earning by consoling the bereaved with messages from beyond the grave.

Uxbal is a man trying to make ends meet and is being pulled in different directions by said ends. Stylistically Inarritu has maintained his realist bleached out color palette and this gives rawness to light and we get to experience Uxbal’s sensitive eyes from too many sleepless nights. Barden as Uxbal is exceptional; he brings a nuanced stoic sensitivity to the lead role that operates as an anchor for the rest of the story and its issues to revolve. Uxbal is a struggling man trying to do right he is no superman.

A life, any life, is almost unbearably precarious and when woken from this somnambulistic tread of everyday repetition how will one confront that ‘light’ that we all must conform to. Using agents of capitalism's exploited itinerant victims Inarritu weaves a meditation for confronting your own time.