Biutiful (Mexican/Spanish)
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
With: Javier Bardem, Maricel Alvarez, etc.
What to say about this movie? The director, who also gave us Babel, has created a deeply despairing and downbeat film, and an over-long one. There is a subplot given much time at the beginning of the story that simply disappears by the end of the film. Maybe it was just one more attempt to provide “depth” for his main character, Uxbal (Bardem), a petty crook in Barcelona.
Uxbal is a psychic who can speak with the dead, this being the subplot that vanishes, and smuggles in illegals to work in sweat shops that provide counterfeit goods for African peddlers to sell on the street. He has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and is trying desperately to set aside money for his children. His estranged wife (Alvarez) is a party girl and some-time hooker with a drug problem. She loves Uxbal and the kids, but has little self-control when she decides it’s playtime.
Bardem’s talent and great everyman/peasant face are the only things that kept me interested in the movie, although Alvarez does a great job as his wife. The story takes pains to give us a complex view of Uxbal. He certainly loves and dotes on his children, and he gives his wife many chances to straighten out, but she betrays him in various and painful ways and is not a fit guardian for the children.
Almost everything Uxbal touches turns to crap. In trying to be a good guy, he buys a heater for the dorms where the sweat-shop workers sleep and inadvertently cause a tragedy. It’s just like that with him. So, we don’t have high hopes for his aspirations.
Unlike the sprawling and tedious Babel, Biutiful stays mostly on message, but the message is so depressing that I can’t really recommend it. If you need to see the director’s work, or Bardem’s, by all means go, but be warned that you will not leave the theater feeling like a better person.
B-
The Illusionist (Animated, French)
Director: Sylvain Chomet
Voices of: Jean-Claude Donda, Eilidh Rankin
From the team that made The Triplets of Belleville in 2003, itself a wonderful film, comes a gorgeous animated movie produced from a script left behind by Jacques Tati, the French director/genius who was once a mime (when it was still a novelty) and whose films had almost no dialog.
Here, the illusionist is a so-so magician struggling to make a living in the 60s, when rock & roll bands are becoming the thing to book into venues that once featured magic acts. So, the magician moves to Scotland and stays in a show-biz hotel where he meets Alice, a young chambermaid and shrinking violet.
He informally adopts her, and she begins to slowly emerge from her cocoon. He buys her new shoes, and soon she is asking for more. Naturally, as she glams up, she begins to attract attention from a young man.
The beauty of this film is less in the bittersweet aspect of the script than in the lovely art work and the sly humor. The affectionate, but pointed, satire directed at the old-show-business performers and their disappearing world prepares us for the idea that our hero is also part of that world, and must fade away.
This is one beautiful movie. The handmade art work and the Tati script hark back to a time we may never see again. May be over the heads of children, but all grown-ups with a heart should see it.
Check out the illustrations.
A