Some friends and I were recently listing the saddest movies we'd ever seen, and I didn't really have one. My disposition falls on the happy-go-lucky side, and I tend to avoid anything that will send me into spirals of depression. I say that having just watched Biutiful, a Spanish-language import from director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams), in which Javier Bardem plays a devoted father of two who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and spends his last months on earth squirreling away ill-gotten cash so his kids won't starve when he's gone. Wait, it gets worse.
Bardem plays Uxbal, a tangential player in Barcelona's criminal underworld, who works as a middleman between the owners of a Chinese sweatshop, their quasi-slave labor and the cops. He wrangles African youth who vend the bootleg DVDs and handbags the sweatshop produces, supplies undocumented labor to construction sites and bribes the cops to limited effect. People rely on Uxbal, they trust him, and he is ultimately not worthy of this trust. It's not that he's a bad dude, it's just that the reality of his life and the choices he is forced to make are constantly conspiring against him.
Watching Biutiful I was reminded of American films of the early 1970s set in New York City. There's a grittiness to the Barcelona streets that shares a kinship with the Big Apple in films like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy, though Biutiful is not concerned with homicidal maniacs or male prostitutes. The environments in the film, including many exterior shots of massive cranes and smokestacks belching out poison, and interiors of apartments that Travis Bickle would have turned down, lend a feeling of inescapable sadness and doom.
Through it all is Javier Bardem, in a performance that Sean Penn has called the best by an actor since Brando in Last Tango In Paris. While I won't go that far, Bardem does deliver a vivid and heartbreaking performance. It's so good that I kind of wish I hadn't seen it. It's going to be a tough one to shake.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu enjoys complex narratives (à la Babel), and here he tells a long (nearly two-and-a-half-hour) sordid tale that touches on crime, poverty, parenting, mental illness and even the supernatural. It all adds up to a crushing film experience, one I'm not sure many moviegoers are going to be willing to endure. It's the odd movie that inspires both admiration and disgust. As it stands, Biutiful is the best movie I've ever seen that you couldn't pay me to watch again. —Joe Bardi
Feeling Blue
At its conclusion, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine leaves the viewer with mixed emotions. There's an almost triumphant swelling of music played over a gorgeous end credits sequence — a seeming mismatch to the downbeat ending of the film. This clash of despair and joy is intentional, the culmination of two parallel stories. The emotions of the two inter-cut plots are completely different (one's happy, the other sad), but they are equally overwhelming.
Blue Valentine follows Dean and Cindy (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) at two different points in their relationship, as they first fall in love and then years later after the marriage has turned miserable. Cianfrance's structure works to avoid the pratfalls of many of the recent "gritty" or "kitchen sink realism" relationship indies, the common complaint about which is boiled down to, "Why are we supposed to care about these (seemingly) despicable characters arguing?" The plot contrivance of Blue Valentine works to show how much the couple has changed, and how the goofy chemistry they once shared has turned into unbearable tension.
Early in the film, as the pair wake up and have breakfast with their 5-year-old, it's made clear that Cindy can't stand to be in the same room with the short-tempered and obnoxious Dean. When they try to rekindle the romance with a little booze and sex it's a disaster waiting to happen. Just when we might start asking ourselves why we should care about these awful people, we get a flashback to five or six years ago and see how the pair met. The film makes it clear how Cindy could be attracted to this goofy guy who blurts out everything he thinks. But what's charming in the past has become suffocating in the present.
The actors make the most of this dual structure, not only manipulating themselves physically to look like they have aged, but also maturing their mannerisms along the way. Williams in particular makes these difficult transitions look effortless.
Despite moments of brilliance and heartbreak, it's hard to recommend a film like Blue Valentine. It certainly puts the audience through the ringer. But after it's all over what we have left is simply a collage of memories. They might be hard to process at first, but gradually (as in life) you tend to remember the good times over the bad. Thinking about the film a month after I've seen it, the beautiful honesty outweighs the emotional brutality. —Anthony Nicholas
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2011.