Who’s the leading leading man these days?
Having sat through all 147 dolorous minutes of Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s follow-up to 2006’s Babel (a pretentious clunker gifted with seven Oscar nominations), I’ll nominate Javier Bardem. The Spaniard won’t win Best Actor this year to go with the Supporting Actor statuette he took home three years ago for playing the relentless killer Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, yet I likely would have walked out of Biutiful if anybody else had been starring in it.
Anointing Bardem as the movie star of the moment isn’t terribly counterintuitive. After all, Penelope Cruz just married him. Still, what it is about Bardem’s visage that distinguishes him from earlier soulful brutes such as De Niro, Depardieu, and Crowe?
Biutiful isn’t a very good movie, but it was envisioned around its star’s looks. González Iñárritu has numerous flaws as a filmmaker, but the man does have an eye. As Bardem’s hero—an illegal-immigration coyote who manages Senegalese street peddlers and Chinese construction workers—tries to do right by the people in his world before he leaves it, it becomes clear from all the lingering shots of religious icons on the walls that González Iñárritu wasn’t only thinking about Bardem’s acting dexterity when he wrote the role. He was thinking about Bardem’s nose.
Going back at least 1400 years to the Byzantine Christ Pantokrator encaustic painting in a monastery on Mt. Sinai, a prominent nose that is vertically long but relatively flat in depth has been a standard part of Christian iconography. In 1995, Bardem’s nose got flattened in a disco punch-out, but his new nose has hardly hurt his career. (Bardem says he doesn’t know who slugged him, “but all I can say to the guy is, ‘Jesus, man, thank you.’”) Combined with his rugged brow ridge and severely sloping forehead, Bardem now looks like Caveman Jesus.
Although Biutiful is better than Babel, it’s still a miserable slog. González Iñárritu’s very Mexican obsession with death leads him to inflict tribulations upon his doomed protagonist: terminal prostate cancer, a bipolar ex-wife who is sleeping with his sleazeball brother, and a reputation in his slum for being able to talk to the newly dead. This gets him invited to many funerals, which doesn’t improve his mood. Yet not only is Bardem compelling in a Casablanca-style role as a shady operator who turns out under stress to be a saint, the actor’s Christlike profile even makes some sort of sense out of González Iñárritu’s masochistic Mexican Catholic aesthetics.
González Iñárritu is a spectacular TV commercial director, but his movies seldom have much in particular to say. Babel’s theme, for instance, was…communication. His underlying preference is for melodramatic telenovelas. Thus, his first Hollywood movie, 2003’s 21 Grams—with Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and an outstanding Benicio Del Toro, a goofier-looking version of Bardem, in a similar role as an ex-con trying to go straight—featured a ludicrously humorless storyline about heart transplants and vengeance. But Iñárritu disguises his lowbrow taste in stories with current highbrow markers such as jittery camerawork and scrambling the plot in the editing room.
Fortunately, Biutiful has only one story. Unfortunately, it’s extremely depressing. And González Iñárritu has a new trick to maintain his indie cred: a soundtrack of loud, grating noises.
For a director, González Iñárritu has little sense of place outside of Mexico. In 21 Grams, Memphis wound up looking like Minneapolis, and in Biutiful, he manages to make even Barcelona seem generic. For instance, Biutiful’s dialogue is in Spanish, Chinese, and Wolof, yet not a word of Catalan is spoken.
Just as Babel dwelled upon California’s illegal immigration, Biutiful is set among Barcelona’s illegal immigrants. But while Hollywood approves of illegal immigration here as a way to Fight Racism (while Solving the Servant Problem), globalizing Barcelona doesn’t appeal to sophisticated, authenticity-seeking Americans. In Biutiful, the Chinese sweatshop immigrants who make counterfeit purses and the West Africans who peddle them don’t instill Barcelona with vibrancy; they just make it another tourist trap. Hollywood has a vague sense from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and talk of FC Barcelona’s soccer rivalry with General Franco’s Real Madrid that Barcelona’s working class deserves respect rather than displacement. Moreover, it’s embarrassingly obvious by now that Spain’s recent immigration fad was only another housing-bubble bad idea. Young Spaniards’ current unemployment rate is 42.9 percent. Thus, Babel was showered with Oscar nominations, while Biutiful barely found a distributor in this country.
SIGN UP
Daily updates with TM’s latest
Copyright 2017 TakiMag.com and the author. This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order reprints for distribution by contacting us at editors@takimag.com.