Seeking Beauty In a Time of Tragedy

In “Biutiful,” Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, a man desperately clinging to life at the margins of society in Barcelona. This is not the upscale city of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” Woody Allen’s comedy in which Bardem was a suave lady’s man. In the hands of the great Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Babel,” “21 Grams”), we see the teeming, hustling, multicultural, and poverty-stricken underside of contemporary urban Europe. From the moment he appears on screen, Bardem takes us in with those enormous, heavy-lidded, sad eyes and never lets go. Like every other character in this richly populated film, Uxbal is just trying to get by. He makes money in the gray-market economy of the polyglot city, finding employment for immigrants and protecting street vendors; as a kind of sideline, he attends funerals at which he may or may not have the ability to commune with the spirits of the recently dead. Back home he tries to take care of his two young children, Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella), while dealing with his estranged, unstable wife, Marambra (Maricel Álvarez). And through it all, he struggles to come to terms with what may be his own death sentence. “Biutiful” asks whether it is possible to find random kindness and beauty (hence the title, the Spanish phonetic spelling of “beautiful”) in a time of random cruelty and tragedy; whether one can make moral choices in a world governed by the fight for survival; and whether familial love can endure there. It is a near-great movie. Clocking in at close to two-and-a-half hours, it has an operatic sweep and never loses its hold. Bardem’s Oscar-nominated performance anchors the film, and he is surrounded by an amazing cast headed by Álvarez, riveting as the deeply wounded Marambra. The cinematography is superb. I say “near-great” because “Biutiful” has two flaws. It is stuffed with surreal and symbolic touches; it needed editing, such as an overdone scene at a strip club where the dancers wear bizarre costumes. And its metaphysical ending (bookended with the first moments of the film) falls flat and goes somewhat “Field of Dreams” -like on us. Iñárritu is one of the “Mexican Triumvirate” of directors working today — the others are Alfonso Cuarón (“Y Tu Mamá También,” “Children of Men”) and especially Guillermo del Toro (“Hellboy,” “Pan’s Labyrinth”), both listed as associate producers on this film — who are turning out movies of epic scope that in varying degrees include gritty realism, symbolism, fantasy and so-called magical realism combined with an arresting and original visual style, each his own. Their work, even at its most fantastical, shows us the world as it is, not some Hollywood, idealized version of it. “Biutiful” is rated R for disturbing images, language, sexual content, nudity and drug use. It is playing at The Triplex in Great Barrington. In Spanish and some Chinese, with subtitles.