In his previous movie, Babel, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu hopped from Africa to Asia to North America in search of global misery. His new Biutiful is simpler in structure, with the action restricted to one city and revolving around a single main character. But the shrill melodrama still hauls several continents’ worth of woe.
This is Inarritu’s first film since splitting with scripter Guillermo Arriaga, and it relies less on chronological trickiness than the three movies they made together. (The other two are 21 Grams and Amores Perros.) But the story does start near its end, before wandering through a clunky dream sequence on its way back to the beginning.
Our anti-hero is Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a harried Barcelona hustler who hefts enough plot for several movies. He’s the middleman between two ruthless Chinese merchants and the illegal immigrants who sell their counterfeit goods on the street. Although he’s something less than a saint, Uxbal tries to help both the peddlers, most of them migrants from various African countries, and the Chinese workers who manufacture the knockoffs in a filthy local sweatshop.
Uxbal has custody of his two children, whose mother is a bipolar alcoholic and sometime hooker. Having just learned that he’s seriously ill, Uxbal allows his ex (Maricel Alvarez) to get reacquainted with their kids, 7-year-old Mateo and almost-10-year-old Ana. (It’s the latter who can’t quite spell “beautiful.”)