Remember the old t-shirt, "Life's a bitch and then you die"? That's Biutiful in a nutshell.
Yup.
This is a movie about Javier Bardem walking, slouched, pissy, dying, always pulling cash from his pockets. That's almost every scene of this pretentious, stupid movie. It's so funny that Arriaga and Innaritu had a spat where they each accused the other of not appreciating each other enough, and then independently made the same exact film (apparently). Without Arriaga to supply convergent storylines, Innaritu left to his own devices juggles subplots with the same arbitrary abandon. Nothing is explored with any maturity or depth. Most curiously the film has nothing to say about Bardem's ability to converse with the dead, which is done with such conviction by the actor. And at two-and-a-half hours long, the film is an incredibly chore to sit through, one of the dullest films I've seen in some time.
I was hoping that freed from Arriaga's multiple storylines, Innaritu (not an untalented filmmaker) would find some focus when left to his own devices. While there are undeniably some lovely moments in Biutiful as well as a new cosmic high of miserablism in one particularly tragic sequence, much of it is unbearable. And pretentious! The lav mics remain so audible you can hear clothing rend unnaturally...'cause it's real, man! Likewise, he blows out the audio and picks incredibly weird music. Before Biutiful, I always thought that Innaritu was a talented filmmaker who was making the same movie again and again. After watching this film of his own writing and directing, I think the man is just dumb.
Javier Bardem is good in a how-could-he-not-be kind of way. He gets to do everything a great actor would kill for, and he's fun to watch on the screen. But you can pretty much predict his performance ahead of time. Like the film, he has some particularly wrenching moments, but it's impossible to feel close to this man. I'm glad he is nominated in lieu of Gosling or Duvall, but it's really saying something about the quality of this film that he's not given enough to do...and he's given everything.