Tacoma Arts in Review: "Biutiful" at the Grand Cinema

_{Image Courtesy of Focus Features Int’l}

Skirting elements of both the supernatural and social commentary, Biutiful is a layered and intricate human drama that manages to be perhaps the most visceral, gripping, and utterly depressing film since Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. Although emotionally comparable to Requiem, Biutiful is more delicately rendered – and its intimacy only increases its poignancy. Unlike many of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s other films, such as Babel, 21 Grams, and Amores Perros – all of which follow a twisted series of interwoven narratives – this masterful examination of marginalized life in Barcelona focuses on one just person and his impact on others.

Javier Bardem gained well-deserved Oscar buzz for his role as Uxbal, a small time hustler and dedicated father whose life is deteriorating along with his body. Bardem’s heavy lidded, haunted eyes and shambling gait communicate a weariness truly painful to watch. His heartrending performance is matched and complemented by newcomer Maricel Álvarez, who plays his captivating and bipolar wife Marambra – a well-meaning but unfit mother.

Diagnosed with cancer, Uxbal fights to ignore his own decline as he tries to maintain not only for his children Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella) but also for the illegal immigrants who depend on him as middleman in a hostile and exploitative city. Although Uxbal is the core of the film, the immigrants’ experiences flesh out Biutiful’s tragic narrative and bring an affecting perspective to the film.

From the beginning we are made aware that Uxbal has the ability to communicate with the dead, a skill he uses to supplement his income. Interestingly, this dimension is never really explored. Biutiful evades the supernatural, never making Uxbal’s abilities the focus of the film and leaving them tantalizingly vague. These hints at the supernatural, rather than detracting from the film’s stark realism, heighten and imperceptibly alter our own sense of reality, leaving the audience to consider that the world may be more unknowable than we can appreciate.

Rodrigo Preito’s stunning cinematography captures this subtlety in sequences that are by turns delicate and terrifying, while the soundtrack seamlessly enhances an already acute emotional awareness. The vision Preito imparts is of a reality tainted by Uxbal’s heightened perceptions of death in a world in which there is much more to see, both beautiful and disturbing, than we generally recognize.

Biutiful is not beautiful by any conventional definition, instead the film offers up tragedy and the incomprehensible – and challenges the audience to uncover the inherent beauty in what they cannot hold or know.

Biutiful is showing at the Grand Cinema until March 24
For information and show times, visit The Grand Cinema here.

Review by Lindsey Flatt

ABOUT TACOMA ARTS IN REVIEW
Tacoma Arts In Review, a new column on Exit 133, regularly shares timely reviews and stories on art happenings in Tacoma written by local college students and community members. For more information and application details, go here.