Biutiful Blu-ray delivers stunningly beautiful video and superb audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
This is the journey of Uxbal, a conflicted man who struggles to reconcile fatherhood, love, spirituality, crime, guilt and mortality amidst the dangerous underworld of modern Barcelona. His livelihood is earned out of bounds, his sacrifices for his children know no bounds.
Biutiful made history this year when it became the first ever film to snag a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for a performance delivered
entirely in Spanish. This bleak, dour and relentlessly depressing film is undoubtedly a tour de force for star Javier Bardem, but at almost two
and a half hours, this is a film that simply never lets up emotionally and may simply prove to be too exhausting a trial for many audience members to
endure. Writer-director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu has proven himself to take no prisoners with potential viewers in such previous films as
Amores Perros and Babel. Iñárritu is a filmmaker who loves to wallow in the horrors of desperate characters, and there is so
much wallowing throughout Biutiful that the film's title becomes almost like a taunt, daring you to find some small measure of grace and
salvation in a world of sordid people doing sordid things. Bardem's character Uxbal has a good heart at least and is trying in his own way to provide for
his two children, but he's caught up in a world of crime, has a bi-polar wife whom he can't trust with the kids, and on top of everything else, he's just
been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Good times, eh?
When the Neorealists had their heyday in the post-World War II film world, it was like a shot in the arm to a public that had spent the previous
decades feasting on escapist fare that helped them forget the horrors of worldwide Depression and, then, the global calamity of World War II. It may
seem odd that after things at least pretended to quiet down, at least for a year or two, that film should suddenly erupt with gritty and grimy
accounts of the "little people," usually shot in a verité style that seemed to deliberately go against accepted glossy film production values. There's
something of that same ethos in a lot of Iñárritu's work, although he invariably crafts, well, beautiful images within contexts that
can hardly ever be considered pretty in any real way.
Uxbal lives in a fetid apartment in Barcelona, eking out a living by selling bootlegged items like DVDs churned out by a basically slave labor force of
illegal Chinese immigrants who are being held captive in a squalid warehouse by one of Uxbal's business partners. Uxbal has some actual remorse
about their living conditions, and one of the major subplots has to do with him buying heaters to keep them warm at night. Do you think that
putative good deed turns out for the best? Think again. This is Iñárritu and Biutiful. Things are almost always worse than they
seem.
Biutiful is an incredibly expressive film, brought to life by a magnificent performance by Bardem, who has never been better. But the film
itself is virtually intolerable at times, so horrible are these people's lives and so cruel is fate to most of them. Uxbal's wife is a manic-depressive mess
who is either cheating on him with his own brother, talking a mile a minute in one of her manic phases, or near catatonic when the depression hits.
Uxbal's "army" of salesmen decide to dabble in dealing drugs, leading to a major police crackdown so that many of them are deported back to
Senegal, leaving Uxbal feeling guilty about Ige, a young woman with a child who had been shacked up with one of these guys. The Chinese workers
are another horrible sob story, and then there are Uxbal's own kids, sweet if unruly children who can see their parents in a fractious state and who
aren't above acting out. As if all this horror isn't enough, it turns out Uxbal is "gifted" and can speak with the dead, something that plays into the
film in a patently surreal and creepy way in several segments. (Keep your eye on the ceilings of various settings is my best advice).
So the bottom line in Biutiful becomes, how much heartache can you stand? There is literaly only one truly happy moment in this two and
a half hour film, a brief scene where Uxbal and his wife have reconciled, at least for the moment, and share a sloppy melted ice cream dinner with
their kids. That's it. (A brief birthday party later in the film is colored by Uxbal's impending demise, which is imminent). Otherwise, one hideous
thing after another happens. It's an emotionally wrenching experience that is probably going leave most people absolutely drained and exhausted,
and the last sequence as well as the bookending segments are both ambiguous and simultaneously pointing toward yet another tragedy in the life of
Uxbal.
Despite the relentless downer that Biutiful is, it's one of Iñárritu's most visually assured films yet. Long lingering shots of water stains on
the ceiling or ants crawling up a screen door may not seem like the stuff of gorgeous filmmaking, but Iñárritu manages to imbue these weird
elements with a certain degree of poetry that adds to the emotional turmoil Uxbal and his family and cohorts are experiencing. This film plays out
like a fever dream, a nightmare in fact from which Uxbal can never escape. That in and of itself brings forth a very cogent question: how many
audience members are going to be pining for that very same egress after being introduced to all of these desperate characters?
Caveat Emptor: The review disc I was sent seems to have an authoring error, albeit slight. Pressing play from the main menu actually starts
the film at what seem to be random chapter stops (it started in different places each time). Therefore if you encounter this problem, it's easiest to
begin the film from the scenes selection menu).
Note: The film was intentionally shot in two different aspect ratios, 2.39:1 and 1.85:1, which our screen capture units have shown here. I'm not
sure if this really conveys something incredibly important going on on a subconcious level, as the film's DP has suggested. The filmmakers' intentions
are hobbled by this Blu-ray transfer in any case, as the 1.85:1 AR plays "full screen" (more or less) and the 2.39:1 elements appear masked, with the
typical black bars at top and bottom, which seems to defeat the stated intention of "opening up" the look of the film as Uxbal releases control of his life.
All of that said, you film buffs may remember the critical analyses that accompanied Lindsay Anderson's 'If. . .', which was filmed in both color and black
and white, where a lot of critics claimed to see some method to the various film stocks utilized. Anderson is on record stating they simply ran out of
money and couldn't afford color film for the entire shoot.
Iñárritu has crafted a deliberately bleak and depressing vision throughout a lot (if not most) of Biutiful, but that doesn't necessarily mean this
film isn't absolutely stunning to watch. With a really deeply textured and impeccably saturated AVC/1080p transfer, this film often belies its sad and
doleful countenance to reveal the unexpected beauty in the squalor and poverty of Barcelona's underclass. Filled with deep and evocative shadows
which dance across a light that hints of a sun past its prime, this transfer is filled with dark, but inviting, shadow detail. Fine detail throughout is
excellent, sometimes disturbingly so in terms of the grit and grime these people try to exist in. Some of that grime and grit is intentionally exaggerated
by a really intense grain structure. Iñárritu also has a number of outright surreal elements that play into weirdly distorted sequences, where colors
bleed and the image becomes literally twisted. This film is not easy to watch in terms of content, but as far as the image goes, it's a solid 10 all the way.
Biutiful is a Spanish language film with no English dub available, and so its one soundtrack option is the original Spanish in an appealing lossless
DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix. Though the film plays out in a series of small scale dialogue scenes, we're surrounded by the hustle and bustle of
Barcelona, and it's there that this soundtrack engages in its cinematic surround qualities most successfully. One huge set scene involving a police raid is
completely immersive and filled with a wealth of great sonic detail. Fidelity is excellent throughout this track, and for a non-action film, there's a really
amazing amount of dynamic range here, with the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track picking up everything from Uxbal's faintest whisper to his wife's
hysterics and some loud rock music playing at his brother Tito's, as well as a kind of disturbing party scene at a strip joint.
Behind Biutiful: Director's Flip Notes (HD; 21:42) is an interesting production diary consisting of both film and audio that Iñárritu
kept while doing the film. I loved his quote about Bardem: "It seems in Javier's face all the stories of humanity could be told."
Biutiful Crew (HD; 4:02) is a weird little featurette offering various crew members rapping and singing as well as working in their
production office.
Interviews (1080i; 8:17) features some nice moments with Bardem, as well as Eduard Fernandez who plays Uxbal's brother Tito and
Maricel Alvarez who plays Uxbal's estranged wife Marambra.
There is no getting around the fact that Biutiful is an incredibly involving, emotionally devastating experience. But that very relentlessly dour
quality will be also unbelievably off-putting and just downright depressing for a lot of viewers. The fact that the film lasts close to two and a half hours
may make it simply unbearable for some people to get through. This is a challenging, deeply felt experience, and my advice is if you can handle this sort
of downer, take a deep breath and jump into one of the most commanding performances of this or any year. Recommended.
Lionsgate Home Entertainment has announced Biutiful for Blu-ray release on May 31. This Academy Award nominated Spanish-language drama, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, stars Javier Bardem as a man living on the wrong side of the law who struggles to provide ...
