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Dancing_P [ 4.0 ]
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The Larry Flynt of the misery porn genre, Alejandro Innaritu, strikes again with a would-be neorealist melodrama so overwrought it often seems like a serious riff on the Aristocrats joke. Inarritu makes his first film without frequent collaborator and misery enthusiast Guillermo Arriaga and the differences are minimal; while the film eschews (for the most part) the multi-strand narrative, it keeps the grime, misery and mounting hopelessness of his previous work and covers it in a thick coat of gloppy melodrama.
Javier Bardem stars as Uxbal, the father of two adorable moppets and a righteous man who has no job but spends his days helping out illegal immigrants. His wife is a bipolar cheating harlot who's sleeping with his brother; his main source of income seems to be shady business with Africans who sell tchotchkes on the street and Asians who work in a sweatshop as well as speaking to the dead and getting paid for it. All this is kind of shitty, true, but not nearly as shitty as the inoperable terminal cancer that's afflicting this righteous, selfless man.
Tragedy piles atop tragedy for an arduous two-and-a-half hours of never-ending misery. There's little joy to be found anywhere in the film; even the most depressing of films typically showcase some kind of positive event, even if it is to be taken away immediately thereafter. The non-stop barrage of misery found in Biutiful isn't just depressing, it's downright oppressive. I'm usually pretty easily manipulated by even the corniest of directors; I even thought Crash was decent in its over-the-top manner. What Innaritu does here is beyond simple manipulation; it's a severe beating by way of pathos that will serve to exhaust even the grimmest of audiences. Bardem is predictably great as the suffering martyr and Innaritu's visual flair shows us a Barcelona rarely captured on-screen but the cataclysmic series of unfortunate events suggest the darkest of comedies (a la A Serious Man) rather than the slice-of-life peasant opera Biutiful so desperately wants to be.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.2 |
| No. Ratings | : 1 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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